Ill 



\i LIBKARY OF CONGRESS. «l 



■_■. 



<=m^ 



W\ 



(■' 



r<7//ic ^ — y y^. 



.* UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.' 

t 



REMOVING 



IF 



M O U N TA I N S: 



3Ltfe Hessons from tfje ffiospels. 



BY 






JOHN S. HART. 




NEW YORK: 

ROBERT CARTER AND BROTHERS, 

530, Broadway. 

1870. 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by 

ROBERT CARTER AND BROTHERS, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for 
the Southern District of New York. 



CAMBRIDGE! 
PRESS OF JOHN WILSON AND SON. 



PREFACE. 



TVTO book so richly rewards thoughtful 
study as the Gospel narrative. It is 
indeed the same familiar story, — ever old, 
yet ever new. We know it by heart, yet 
we never read it afresh without learning 
from it new truths which had before es- 
caped our notice. Returning from this 
rich field, where, for a time, I have been 
gleaning after other and abler reapers, I 
lay my little sheaf at the feet of the Mas- 
ter, humbly thanking him for the joy it 
has given me to gather these few golden 
grains, and willingly leaving them to such 
service as he himself may appoint in sup- 
plying the spiritual wants of his own dear 

children. 

J. S. H. 
Trenton, N. J., Jan. 28, 1870. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAP. PAGE 

I. Removing Mountains. (Matthew xvii. 

14-21) 9 

II. Martha and Mary. (Luke x. 38-42) 16 

III. Compensations. (Luke xvi. 19-29) . 22 

IV. God's Joy at the Conversion of Sin- 

ners. (Luke xv. 3-20) 27 

V. LO, THESE MANY YEARS DO I SERVE 

Thee. (Luke xv. n-23) 32 

VI. Attitude of the Mind in Prayer. 

(Luke xviii. 9-14) 37 

VII. Lacking. (Mark x. 17-22) . . . . 43 
VIII. The Alabaster Box of Precious Oint- 
ment. (John xii. 1-11) ..... 49 

IX. The Things that belong to C^sar 

(Matthew xxii. 15-22) 54 

X. Our Father. (Matthew vi. 6-13) . . 62 
XL Consolation. (John ix. 34-38) ... 68 

XII. Jesus at Table. (Luke xiv. 1-24) . . 75 

XIII. The Cross. (Luke xiv. 25-33) ... 82 

XIV. Praying for Children. (Matthew xv. 

21-28) 87 

XV. Deaf and Dumb. (Mark vii. 31-37) . 90 
XVI. The Miracle of Food. (Matthew xv. 

32-39) • 95 

XVII. The Signs of the Times. (Matthew 

xvi. 1-12) ... 100 



VI 



CONTENTS. 



CHAP. 

XVIII. 

XIX. 

XX. 

XXI. 

XXII. 
XXIII. 
XXIV. 

XXV. 

XXVI. 

XXVII. 

XXVIII. 
XXIX. 

XXX. 
XXXI. 

XXXII. 

XXXIII. 
XXXIV. 



XXXV. 

XXXVI. 

XXXVII. 

XXXVIII. 

XXXIX. 
XL. 



PAGE 

Confession. (Matthew xvi. 13-20) . 105 

Foretastes. (Matthew xvii. 1-13) . in 
Loss and Gain. (Matthew xvi. 

24-26) 116 

The Temple Tax. (Matthew xvii. 

24-27) 123 

Primacy. (Mark ix. 33-37) . . . 129 

Forbearance. (Matthew viii. 21-35) J 35 
The Twelve and the Seventy. 

(Luke x. 1-12) 141 

Where are the Nine ? (Luke xvii. 

n-19) 147 

Joy. (Luke x. 17-24) 153 

Charity for the Heterodox. 

(Luke x. 25-37) 160 

Sight to the Blind. (John ix. 1-12) 165 
Witnessing for the Truth. (John 

ix. 13-34) 172 

Christ the Door. (John x. 1-18) 179 
The Doctrine of the Resurrec- 
tion. (John xi. 17-27) .... 186 
" If Thou hadst been here ! " (John 

xi. 20-32) 193 

Jesus wept. (John xi. 33-44) • . 198 
The Agony of Entrance into 
Christ's Kingdom. (Luke xiii. 

23-30) 204 

Speechless. (Matthew xxii. 2-14) 209 
Husks. (Luke xv. n-32) .... 214 
Reward. (Matthew xx. 1-16) . . 219 
The Prayer of Salome. (Mat- 
thew xx. 20-28) 223 

A Blind Beggar. (Mark x. 46-52) 228 

Zaccheism. (Luke xix. 1-10) . . 235 



CONTENTS. 



Vll 



CHAP. PAGE 

XLI. Improving Opportunities. (Luke 

xix. n-27) 240 

XLII. Jesus as King. (Matthew xxi. 1-11) 246 
XLIII. The Children's Hosannas. (Mat- 
thew xxi. 12-16) 251 

XLIV. Nothing but Leaves. (Matthew xxi. 

17-22) .255 

XLV. The Wicked Husbandmen. (Mat- 
thew xxi. 33-41) 264 

XL VI. Ground to Powder. (Matthew xxi. 

42-46) . . . 269 

XL VII. The Two Sides of our Lord's Char- 
acter. (Luke xix. 41-48) .... 274 
XL VIII. The Two Sermons. (Matthew xxiii. 

13-24) • • 279 

XLIX. The Two Loves. (Matthew xxii. 

34-4o) 285 

L. The Outside of the Cup and of 
the Platter. (Matthew xxiii. 

25-28) 289 

LI. The Deserted House. (Matthew 

xxiii. 29-39) 293 

LIT. Doing and Knowing. (John vii. 

H-3O 298 



I. 



REMOVING MOUNTAINS, 



(Matthew xvii. 14-21.) 

/^\UR Lord often used strong language 
^^^ in enforcing his doctrines. These 
forms of expression have become so familiar 
to us, that in many cases we fail to appre- 
ciate their almost startling force. It is well, 
therefore, occasionally to use some method 
of comparison which may make the preg- 
nant import of the Saviour's words more 
real to our minds. Let us see if we can 
in any way realize to our own minds the 
mighty power which our Lord ascribes to 
faith. 

In all human -calculations, the ultimate 
unit of power, as of value, is what one man 
can do in a day. Let us apply this test to 
the case before us, and let us begin with a 
very familiar example. In travelling by 



IO REMOVING MOUNTAINS. 

railroad, we often see a gang of laborers, 
thirty or forty perhaps together, busily en- 
gaged with wheelbarrow and spade in level- 
ling a projecting bank, wheeling the gravel, 
barrow-load at a time, into the adjoining 
marsh. Now, by using the formulas com- 
mon among engineers, we can calculate just 
how many months will be required for a 
given company of laborers to bring the hill 
to the level of the surrounding plain. But 
suppose the problem were to wheel the Alle- 
ghanies on the east and the Rocky Mountains 
on the west, with all the intervening hills 
and mountains, into the ocean, so as to 
make of the whole North American con- 
tinent one vast, level plain. Scientific en- 
gineers, such as those who, in pushing the 
iron track across the continent, had to level 
so many hills and to fill up so many valleys, 
could calculate the requirements of even this 
problem, though doubtless it would take the 
entire working population of the globe, work- 
ing steadily for more centuries than those 
which have revolved since the time of Adam. 
So stupendous is the work of removing 
mountains ! and the Rocky Mountains and 
the Alleghanies, be it remembered, are by 



REMOVING MOUNTAINS. II 

no means among the highest or most diffi- 
cult to be found upon the earth. Yet this is 
the bold figure by which Christ would con- 
vey to us some idea of the mighty power of 
faith. The idea would be still nearer the 
truth, if, instead of twelve hundred millions 
of men being employed upon the task, and 
that for a thousand generations, it were 
given to one single man to lift from their 
bed, not the Alleghanies merely, but the 
stupendous Himalayas, and, by a single ex- 
ertion of power, to transfer their mighty 
upheaved mass from the centre of Asia to 
the centre of the Pacific Ocean, and to do it, 
moreover, with the same ease with which an 
ordinary man would pick up a mustard-seed 
and throw it into the highway ! 

And is it possible, we may well exclaim, 
that there is in the world a power, which, 
without the charge of exaggeration, may be 
spoken of in terms such as these? What 
is this faith, that can work such wonders? 
What are some of the mountain-like diffi- 
culties, which it has the power to remove? 

Let us look at the case which led our 
Lord to make his startling assertion. The 
youth who was brought to be healed was, 



12 REMOVING MOUNTAINS. 

in the first place, a lunatic. His reason had 
fled, he was a madman ; and though this 
form of disease, under the skilful treatment 
of modern science, is at times within the 
reach of remedies, yet at others it defies all 
the efforts of human skill, and the physician 
finds that he can no more restore the reason 
than he could originally create it. In the 
case of the youth before us, we are expressly 
told that the disease was of the most aggra- 
vated kind: he was "sorely afflicted" and 
violent, and bent apparently upon self-de- 
struction, throwing himself "oft-times into 
the fire, and oft into the water." Besides this, 
and perhaps as the cause of it, he had that 
particular form of evil which, for wise pur- 
poses, was suffered to prevail in Judea at 
that time. He was inhabited by a demon. 
A spirit from the pit of woe, wicked, mali- 
cious, unclean, and of terrific power, was 
allowed, in some manner unexplainable to 
us, to dwell inside of this human form, and 
to exert a controlling influence over the 
youth's thoughts and actions. What could 
medical aid, what could human strength of 
any kind, avail in such a case? 

Are there not now cases of moral and 



REMOVING MOUNTAINS. 1 3 

spiritual derangement as hopeless, appar- 
ently, as was that of the lad brought to 
our Saviour on that occasion? Suppose the 
case of the convict Twitchell to be as the 
jury found it to be, and that he really killed 
that defenceless old woman in the cruel man- 
ner described, whether his motive was that 
of gain, or the demon of ungovernable pas- 
sion, who would hope successfully to plant 
the seeds of mercy, gentleness, or forbear- 
ance, in such a soil? And who has not 
seen cases of drunkenness, of uncleanness, 
of lying, of profanity, of stealing, where 
the criminal seems given over beyond all 
power of self-control, and where reform 
seems as hopeless as would be the attempt 
to pluck up Chimborazo by the roots and 
cast it into the sea? And who can go 
through the slums and the low haunts of 
vice in our cities, without feeling that a 
thorough purification of society is indeed 
a difficulty mountain-high? Or who can 
look abroad over the world, and see the 
hundreds of millions of the race that are 
sunk in heathenism, and the enormous mag- 
nitude of the work to be done before the 
nations shall be converted, and not feel that 



14 REMOVING MOUNTAINS. 

the task is, humanly speaking, hopeless? 
Or, without referring to these extreme cases, 
whether general or particular, who was ever 
brought by the Spirit of God to see his own 
exceeding sinfulness, without feeling that 
barriers impassable, mountain-high, were 
interposed between him and his Maker? 

The man who attempts, in any other way 
than that appointed in the gospel, either to 
convert himself, or to convert others, to re- 
form the intemperate, or the slaves of pas- 
sion in any shape, to regenerate society, or 
the world, will find himself confronted by a 
task equal to that of the disciples when they 
undertook to exorcise the demon out of the 
unfortunate boy. What, then, shall he do? 
Shall he give up in despair? What did the 
disciples do, when they found their efforts 
unavailing? What did the father do, when 
he found that the disciples could not heal 
his child? — He brought the boy to Jesus! 
w Bring him hither to me" said the Master. 
That is the true cure for unbelief. That is 
the faith which removes mountains. Not 
that the work before us is easy. Not that 
we can of ourselves do it. But Christ is al- 
mighty ; and he can do mighty works now, as 



REMOVING MOUNTAINS. 1 5 

easily as he did then. We must look away 
from ourselves, look away from the moun- 
tains of difficulty that are before us, and all 
around us, and look only on Him. 





II. 



MARTHA AND MARY. 



(Luke x. 38-42.) 

TV /TARTHA was not a worldling. To 
- J ^ J - think of her thus is to mistake the 
sacred narrative, and to miss the lesson 
which it is intended to convey. If I read 
the story aright, she truly loved the Saviour, 
and sought to do him honor. Her error lay 
in the mistaken method by which her love 
was shown. 

We are not to understand our Lord as 
censuring Martha for attending to the rites 
of hospitality. He was their guest. Though 
the Lord of glory, he was also man, having 
human wants. He hungered and thirsted 
as other men do, and it was the duty of the 
sisters to provide for him the necessary food. 
If at the last day it will be a matter of con- 



MARTHA AND MARY. 1 7 

demnation to any that they have seen one of 
Christ's disciples ahungered or athirst and 
did not minister unto him (Matthew xxv. 44, 
45)5 how much more guilty would they be 
who should suffer Christ himself to go with- 
out food when he was hungry, and that, too, 
in their own house? Martha was right, 
therefore, in seeing that a suitable meal w 7 as 
prepared for their guest. Her mistake was, 
that she set an undue importance upon the 
matter. Instead of merely supplying his 
wants, she must needs get up a great enter- 
tainment for him. She must have a need- 
less variety of dishes, and show off perhaps 
the skill and resources of her art as a house- 
keeper. Instead of thinking mainly of what 
the wonderful guest might do for her, of the 
infinite store of blessing that hung upon his 
lips, she was wholly intent upon what she 
might do for him. Her heart was set upon 
doing something for Christ, rather than upon 
receiving something from him. While thus 
absorbed and fretted with the cares of how 
she might give her table a more comely 
appearance in the eyes of the Master, how 
she might place before him delicacies of the 
culinary art to tempt his appetite, she was 
2 



l8 MARTHA AND MARY. 

losing the heavenly manna which he came 
to dispense, the angels' food that was needed 
for the nourishing of her own soul. More 
than this. Not only did she thus throw 
away this priceless opportunity of hearing 
the words of eternal life directly from the 
lips of Christ himself, but she was unreason- 
ably vexed at Mary for not being as foolish 
as herself. 

The Marthas have never been extinct in 
the church. There are always disciples 
who are so much occupied with the cares 
of ministering to Christ's servants, and of 
attending to the temporalities of religion, as 
to neglect their own spiritual interests. How 
often does it happen, when a minister goes 
to some destitute neighborhood to preach, 
and becomes for the time the guest of some 
pious family, the Martha of the household 
is so intent on caring for the good man's 
personal comfort as to lose for herself the 
opportunity of hearing the precious gospel 
from his lips. Of course there may be an 
extreme in the opposite direction. The ser- 
vant of Christ may be neglected, and his 
comfort so little cared for that he cannot be 
as useful as he otherwise might be to those 



MARTHA AND MARY. 1 9 

to whom he is sent. Sour bread, indigest- 
ible pastry, ill-cooked meats, unseasonable 
hours, and unvvarmed rooms may give him 
cold, indigestion, headache, and fever, and 
thus unfit him for service of any kind. The 
mistress of the house may even be a Xan- 
tippe instead of a Martha. There is a well- 
authenticated instance, known to not a few 
of my readers, of an eminent clergyman 
who, at the close of a long and exhausting 
night session of the Synod, invited a number 
of his fellow-ministers to his house to be re- 
freshed. His wife, perverting into a cruel 
jest the request to have a "light" supper 
prepared, invited the ministers into the din- 
ing-room to a table set out with about fifty 
candles all ablaze ! Such examples of per- 
versity fortunately are rare. Ministers have 
more commonly to complain of the neglect 
of their message than of the neglect of them- 
selves. 

It is quite possible that there was some 
truth in Martha's complaint against her sis- 
ter. Very possibly Mary may have been so 
absorbed with the "good part" which she 
had chosen, the religious privileges which 
she was enjoying, as to be really negligent 



20 MARTHA AND MARY. 

of her household duties, and to throw upon 
Martha alone burdens which should have 
been shared equally by both the sisters. 
Had Mary, sitting at the Master's feet and 
drinking in the precious doctrine that fell 
from his lips, been puffed up thereby, 
and said to Jesus, "Speak to my sister 
Martha, that she stop her household cares, 
and come and sit with me in this devout 
frame of mind," very possibly the rebuke 
might have fallen in the other direction. 
When, a few years since, Mr. Guinness 
was holding in Philadelphia that long-con- 
tinued series of daily meetings which attract- 
ed so much attention, I knew a lady who 
attended every one of those services, absent- 
ing herself for this purpose from home daily 
for a number of weeks, to the entire neglect 
of a family of young children, and of a hus- 
band who was lying in bed helpless from 
wounds. She thought, doubtless, that she 
was copying Mary, that she was sitting at 
the Master's feet, and had chosen that good 
part which should not be taken from her. 
She thought others awfully irreligious who 
did not follow her example. I doubt whether 
the Saviour, had he visited in person that 



MARTHA AND MARY. 21 

neglected and comfortless household, would 
have confirmed this woman's verdict, either 
in regard to herself or her neighbors. 

No woman can claim to be a Mary, no 
matter how great the ecstasies of her piety, 
who by neglect of domestic duties makes 
home cheerless. No woman can escape the 
imputation of being a Martha, who lets her 
desire to shine as a housekeeper interfere 
with the spiritual interests of herself and her 
household. Good housekeeping is indeed a 
great blessing. But Christ in the house is 
something infinitely greater. 




HI. 



COMPENSATIONS. 



(Luke xvi. 19-29.) 

TN a small inland village of New England 
•*- dwells a lone woman, who for more 
than thirty }'ears has suffered an amount 
of bodily pain that seems almost incredible. 
Her relatives all dead, herself unable to 
die, and with no means of living, except 
the occasional charity of strangers, this 
poor woman seems a more pitiable spec- 
tacle than even Lazarus. He died, and so 
was eased of his pains. She lives on from 
year to year, as if to show how long the 
thread of life may bear the extreme tension 
of pain, and not break. Yet this poor, suf- 
fering woman is a child of God. From 
early girlhood, and through all these years 
of sublime patience, she has been a consist- 
ent Christian. 



COMPENSATIONS. 23 

Fresh from the bedside of Chloe Lankton, 
let any one walk for a mile or two along 
that splendid succession of palatial dwell- 
ings in the famous Fifth Avenue of New 
York, where w r ealth has accumulated its 
resources in such amazing profusion. Let 
him enter one of those stately mansions. 
The owner seems to be a special favorite of 
Heaven. Every enterprise that he touches 
turns to gold. Whether he buys or sells, 
he gains. He has heaped up riches until 
his greatest labor is to count his possessions, 
and to know how much he is really worth. 
A single meal in his house — nay, possibly a 
single dish — has at times cost more mon- 
ey than has sufficed for that lone sufferer 
through more than half a century of pover- 
ty. With these boundless resources for the 
gratification of his appetites, he is blessed 
with abounding health, and he can revel 
with impunity in the enjoyment of whatever 
his heart desires. Whatever can feast the 
eye or the imagination is at his call. Books 
and pictures and statuary, rare flowers from 
every clime, costly silks and tapestry, and 
whatever else can make a human abode 
luxurious, are there at his bidding. Yet 



24 COMPENSATIONS. 

this man, the seeming favorite of Heaven, 
is a thorough worldling. He does not own 
God in any of his ways. He is perhaps an 
open infidel and scoffer. 

Is God righteous? Does he really control 
and govern the affairs of men? How is it 
that we so often see the wicked w spreading 
himself like a green bay-tree," and the 
righteous suffering in pain and want? 

One object, at least, that our Lord seemed 
to have in view, in the parable of Dives 
and Lazarus, was to answer this question. 
It was by lifting, in a single instance, the 
veil that separates us from the unseen world, 
and enabling us to see the end of those two 
contrasted characters, that he vindicated the 
equity of God's providence. The infinite 
hereafter is a necessary item in the account, 
whenever we would take the sum of any 
man's fortune. In the science of Algebra, 
we have a character to indicate infinity. 
Let this mysterious symbol be connected, 
first with one quantity by the sign plus, 
and then with another quantity by the sign 
minus, and it matters little what was the 
original value of those quantities. The 
first has become at once beyond computa- 



COMPENSATIONS. 25 

tion large, the second has sunk into the 
lowest abyss of littleness. The plutocrat of 
Fifth Avenue, minus a treasure in the world 
to come, is a pauper. The man who has 
barely a crust of bread here, plus eternal 
blessedness hereafter, is rich. We must 
follow Lazarus to Abraham's bosom, Dives 
to the place of torment, and add to both 
conditions the awful symbol of infinity, be- 
fore we can properly understand the com- 
pensations by which the grand equation of 
God's providence is maintained. 

But let us not mistake here. A man is 
not necessarily a saint because he is poor. 
On the contrary, the great majority of pau- 
pers are as wicked as they are abject. Nor 
is a man necessarily a worldling because he 
is rich. Some of the most godly men in 
New York live in the Fifth Avenue. But 
Christ would teach us, by these two ex- 
treme cases, that it makes little difference 
what is our condition here, if our condition 
hereafter is all right. Let the rich learn to 
use their riches for the alleviation of suffer- 
ing, and to lay up treasures in heaven. Let 
the poor learn to be patient, and to make 
sure of that inheritance which is incor- 



20 COMPENSATIONS . 

ruptible, undefiled, and which fadeth not 
away, eternal in the heavens. 

The parable gives us also a most painful 
impression in regard to the awful awaken- 
ing that awaits many of our rich and worldly 
people, when they come to die. The lan- 
guage may seem harsh in these dainty times. 
But remember it is our Lord himself who 
speaks of these people as lifting up their 
eyes, being in torments. It makes one shud- 
der to think how many there are, all around 
us, people of refinement, wealth, and fash- 
ion, whose character is exactly like that of 
the "rich man" in this parable. Shall we 
dare to say that our Lord was mistaken in 
the picture which he has drawn of the ordi- 
nary issue of such a career? And can we 
contemplate without emotion the prospect 
of such an issue to those whom we have 
known these many years in the ordinary 
walks of business and of social life? 



n ^M^: 



TZ v 



IV. 



GOD'S JOY AT THE CONVERSION 
OF SINNERS. 

(Luke xv. 3-20.) 

r I ^HE things hardest to be understood in 
-*• the Scripture, in the sense at least of 
believing and realizing them to be true, are 
not the doctrines of God's sovereignty, but 
those of his gracious fatherhood. Talk of 
fore-ordination, of omnipresent and absolute 
control of mind and matter in all things, 
great and small, past, present, and to come, 
— doubtless it is a mighty deep, in which 
our poor sounding lines are soon lost. But 
of -all the mysteries of the Godhead nothing 
is so truly and utterly unfathomable as his 
love to sinful man. That a Being so august, 
so infinitely removed in character and sta- 
tion, should make me the object of his per- 
sonal regard and affection, is a -priori not 



28 god's joy at the 

only incredible, but scarcely intelligible. 
Yet this truth is the great overshadowing 
doctrine of the whole New Testament. It is 
iterated and illustrated by almost every va- 
riety of image and expression of which 
human thought and language are capable, 
until at length the mind grows into some 
faint conception of that infinite love which 
passeth knowledge. 

In the fifteenth chapter of Luke are three 
successive parables, all intended to illustrate 
one feature in this wonderful love ; namely, 
that whenever any human being, no matter 
how wicked or how lowly, truly repents and 
is converted, the infinite Jehovah is moved 
with joy, such as that of the shepherd when 
he recovers a lost sheep, that of a house- 
keeper when she finds a missing piece of 
money, that of a father when a prodigal son 
returns. As the father, the housekeeper, 
the shepherd, call together their friends in 
pleasant festival, to witness and to share 
their joy, so the great God holds high festi- 
val in heaven, he calls together his friends 
to witness and to share the joy he feels, 
when a human soul is born again ! It 
seems incredible. How can it be? 



CONVERSION OF SINNERS. 29 

It was their ignorance of this wonderful 
truth, that prevented the Pharisees from un- 
derstanding the character of Christ. They 
could not comprehend how a teacher come 
from God, one professing special holiness 
of character, could associate familiarly, as 
Jesus did, with publicans and sinners. These 
three parables have for their primary object 
the correction of this false estimate. They 
teach us that no human being is so lowly or 
so wicked, that he may not become the 
object of tender solicitude and personal af- 
fection on the part of the great God ; and 
surely one over whom God in heaven re- 
joices, and holds high festival in presence of 
the angels, is not unfit for the companion- 
ship and the personal interest and friendship 
of God's servants upon earth. 

Men talk largely of philanthropy, and 
associations are formed for the promotion of 
benevolence and of plans for lifting up those 
who are bowed down. God speed all such 
noble plans and efforts. They have their 
place, and are worthy of commendation and 
encouragement. But, for real motive power 
in the work of human renovation, there is 
no brotherhood of man like that which 



30 GOD S JOY AT THE 

springs from the fatherhood of God. How 
can I turn with pharisaic scorn from the 
vilest prodigal, if it is possible that God in 
heaven is yearning over him with fatherly 
affection? How can I regard with indiffer- 
ence even that poor rag-picker whom I see 
shuffling through yonder filthy alley, if I 
truly believe that his conversion would cause 
joy in the presence of the angels? How 
can I withhold my sympathy from any cause 
the success of which sends a throb of joy 
through the heart of Him who sits enthroned 
in the heavens? How can any cause be 
mean which has him for its sympathizer? 
If God in heaven stands with open arms 
to receive every returning prodigal ; if he 
goes in search for the erring, as the woman 
sweeps every corner of her house for a lost 
coin ; if he employs labor and effort to bring 
the wanderer back, as the shepherd lifts the 
stray sheep to his shoulder and carries him 
to the fold instead of driving him thither; 
and if, on the success of any effort at the 
recovery of a lost soul, he, like them, rejoices 
with a high and holy joy, and even calls to- 
gether the sublime hierarchies of heaven to 
witness his joy and to share in it, — how can I 



CONVERSION OF SINNERS. 3 1 

stand aloof from a work which has such 
issues? 

Is there not, in fact, in the heart of the 
Christian, of him who has been truly pene- 
trated with the teachings of these sublime 
parables, a genuine wellspring of benevo- 
lence, not to be once named with the 
" mealy-mouthed philanthropies " of any 
other system? Is there not here a motive 
to beneficence which no other system can 
aiford? What can be grander than the 
thought, that in efforts to restore the out- 
cast and recover the lost we are co-workers 
with God, — nay, with reverence be it 
spoken, — that we are sharers in his sub- 
lime and mysterious joy? 

As a great historical fact, no system of 
mere religious doctrine has been at the same 
time such a power in human affairs as has 
the gospel ; and here is the explanation of 
the fact. The fatherhood of God has its 
necessary correlative in the brotherhood of 
man ; and whoever truly believes in the 
teachings of Christianity, and is brought 
under their influence, cannot but be a phi- 
lanthropist, a benefactor, a lover and a 
helper of his kind. 



V. 



LO, THESE MANY YEARS DO I 
SERVE THEE, 

(Luke xv. 11-23.) 

r I ^HE characters of the Pharisee and of 
the Publican, as drawn by the Evan- 
gelists, are types of two contrasted classes 
of men, which are to be found wherever 
men and women are to be found. Our 
Lord uttered his most terrible denunciations 
towards the Pharisees, men specially marked 
by their religiousness ; while his words of 
most gracious love and tenderness were 
spoken in behalf of men who had been no- 
torious for their misdeeds, — publicans and 
sinners. He seems throughout his ministry 
studiously to have placed himself in antago- 
nism to the former, and in relations of kind- 
ness and fellowship with the latter. There 
is no escaping the conclusion, then, that 



LO, THESE MANY YEARS, ETC. 33 

there maybe a certain kind of religiousness, 
marked by general uprightness of life and 
abounding in acts of devotion, which yet in 
God's sight is more offensive than a life of 
open sin. It is a startling thought surely, 
and may well challenge serious attention. 
This very parable of the Prodigal Son has 
its reverse as well as its obverse side. 
While it holds forth to the sinner a picture 
of his sin and his forgiveness, it at the same 
time, in the character of the elder son, holds 
the mirror up to a class of men who have 
their type in the Pharisee. 

"Lo, these many years do I serve thee." 
This man is a member of the church. He 
attends public worship twice on the Sabbath. 
He is as regular as the clock at the weekly 
lecture and the prayer-meeting. He teaches 
in the Sunday school. He fasts often, 
though perhaps not twice every week. He 
is punctual in paying pew-rent, and sub- 
scribes largely to benevolent societies, possi- 
bly even to the tenth of his income. He is 
zealous for the extension of the church, 
"compassing sea and land to make one 
proselyte." He is among the loudest ad- 
vocates for temperance and moral reform of 

3 



34 LO, THESE MANY YEARS 

every kind. He is notorious as a stickler 
for law and order. What lacks he yet? 
How was it possible that our Lord could use 
such language as he did towards men of 
this class, while he had only words of ten- 
derness and compassion towards repentant 
prodigals? 

Perhaps arithmetic may help us a little in 
the understanding of this question, and the 
illustration may be allowable, since our 
Lord himself used one of like import in 
a parallel case. We all know something 
of the magnitude of the debt of the United 
States. Now let us suppose two men, each 
of whom owes an amount equal to our entire 
national debt, say two thousand five hundred 
millions of dollars. Towards the payment 
of this claim one debtor has ten dollars, the 
other has one cent, or perhaps nothing at 
all. Now, though it may be true that ten 
dollars, as compared with one cent, is as a 
thousand to one, yet, when compared to the 
whole obligation, the two sums are substan- 
tially equal. The two men are equally and 
hopelessly bankrupt. 

The mistake of the Pharisee is that he has 
no adequate conception of the extent and 



DO I SERVE THEE. 35 

magnitude of God's claim upon him, — a 
claim so great that, in view of it, the worst 
of men and the best of men are on a level. 
We are all sinners in the sight of God. One 
looking from the Hochste Spitze of Monte 
Rosa, sheer down ten thousand feet, upon 
the little village of Macugnaga, would see 
no difference in the height of two of the 
villagers, though one might be a giant of 
ten feet and the other a pigmy of three. 
Could we realize how infinitely we all fall 
below the height of God's requirements, we 
would understand better the hatefulness of 
spiritual pride, and the scorn which our 
Lord felt towards it. Where all are hope- 
lessly ruined and guilty, the virtues first 
required are humility towards God, and 
charity towards our fellow-sinners. In both 
of these the Pharisee failed. He was elated 
on account of the ten dollars in his pocket : 
he forgot the claim of two thousand five 
hundred millions hanging over his head. 
Our Lord does not commend the sin of the 
prodigal, or condemn the good done by the 
elder son ; but he would have us understand 
that the state of the heart towards God is of 
more importance than any thing we can do 



36 LO, THESE MANY YEARS, ETC. 

for him, and that the repentant sinner, who 
says, " I will arise and return to my father," 
is in a more hopeful condition than the most 
orthodox and zealous religionist, whose feel- 
ing is, "Lo, these many years do I serve 
thee." 








VI. 

ATTITUDE OF THE MIND IN 
PRAYER. 



(Luke xviii. 9-14.) 

1\ /TUCH has been written upon the prop- 
-*•*•*• er attitude to be observed in prayer. 
Churches are divided on this subject, some 
contending for standing as the proper and 
Scriptural attitude, some for kneeling, some 
bowing the head, some, like the Orientals, 
lying prostrate. I do not propose to discuss 
this question, although I may say, in passing, 
that I by no means regard it as unimportant. 
But vastly more important than any ques- 
tion of the attitude of the body in prayer is 
the question, what shall be our mental atti- 
tude? In no part of our Lord's teachings is 
this point brought out into bolder relief than 
in the parable of the Pharisee and the Pub- 
lican. 



38 ATTITUDE OF THE MIND IN PRAYER. 

The Pharisee here described is by no 
means an irreligious man. On the con- 
trary, he is one whose modern representa- 
tive would pass with the multitude for a 
model Christian. He is thoroughly ortho- 
dox, exemplary in all his dealings with his 
fellow-men, is a praying man, a communi- 
cant, unusually strict in the duties- of private 
devotion, and liberal to a proverb in giving 
money to every scheme of religious benevo- 
lence. The mistake which he makes is, 
not in his doing these things, but in the 
estimate which he puts upon them ; in his 
comparing himself with other men, instead 
of comparing himself and his doings with 
the requirements of God's holy law. Our 
Lord would teach us that the man who has 
been an open profligate, if now repentant 
and humble, has a better prospect of God's 
favor than the most scrupulous religionist 
who is puffed up with spiritual pride. It 
is not that a course of profligacy is in itself 
a good preparation for acceptable devotion, 
or that a life marked by religious and moral 
observances is in itself wrong and to be dis- 
couraged ; but such is the infinite greatness 
of God's righteous claims upon us, that after 



ATTITUDE OF THE MIND IN PRAYER. 39 

our very best efforts we must still feel that 
we are but unprofitable servants. 

Let us examine a single item only in the 
account which the Pharisee gave of himself. 
He felt an unconcealed satisfaction in the 
amount of his donations to religious objects. 
The amount, undoubtedly, was large, — one- 
tenth of all that he possessed, or, according 
to the more exact meaning of the original, 
one-tenth of all his income ; not his income 
after deducting his necessary expenses, but 
his gross income or receipts. It was a 
scale of liberality far beyond that ordinarily 
reached by Christian men in these days. 
Such a scale of giving adopted by the pro- 
fessing Christians of the United States would 
swell the coffers of the church to at least one 
hundred millions of dollars annually. Yet 
why should this man, why should any man, 
pride himself in giving to God a part, w r hen 
all we have is his? As well might Mr. 
Boutwell stand up in presence of the people 
of the United States and felicitate himself that 
he was not like those thieves of the whiskey 
ring who had cheated the government of its 
just dues ; that, so far from that, he had 
actually bestowed upon government purposes 



40 ATTITUDE OF THE MIND IN PRAYER. 

one whole tenth of the entire revenues which 
had come into his possession ! 

The man who has property, so called, 
holds it simply as a steward. It is no more 
his, by absolute right, than are the revenues 
of the United States the property of the 
officer who administers them. The only 
difference is, the sovereign people require 
their steward to spend all the income in 
their service, while our heavenly Father re- 
quires of us for his service only a small 
portion of the estate which he permits us to 
manage. It is all his, of absolute right ; but 
he graciously permits us to use nine-tenths 
of it, or more, for our own pleasure. To 
pride ourselves upon what we have given 
for the service of religion, or upon what we 
have done for God in any way, is to mistake 
utterly our true position as dependent creat- 
ures, who can give nothing, who can do 
nothing,- except as he graciously aids us. 
This was the prime mistake of the Pharisee. 
He thought he was doing God service : he 
had no adequate conception of the extent of 
God's claims upon him. 

As pride is that sin upon which our Lord 
has, more frequently than upon any other, 



ATTITUDE OF THE MIND IN PRAYER. 41 

placed the brand of his disapprobation, so 
humility is the grace which more frequently 
than any other called down his special favor 
and approval. No one can be proud who 
does not practically ignore the character and 
existence of God, no one can practically re- 
alize God's existence and perfections without 
being humbled. The man who stands up 
in the divine presence, and says, "I thank 
thee that I am not as the rest of mankind ; I 
am not a thief, not a drunkard, not a liber- 
tine ; I have an utter abhorrence of such 
characters ; I attend strictly to religious 
duties," shows by his very language that 
God is not in his thoughts. Though pro- 
fessing to worship God, he is really thinking 
of himself, and comparing himself with his 
fellow-men. On the other hand, "God, be 
merciful to me a sinner ! " is the language of 
one penetrated with a sense of the glorious 
majesty of God. This poor publican is not 
thinking how much better or worse than the 
Pharisee he is. He thinks of himself only in 
comparison with infinite perfection ; and, 
when measured by that standard, he feels 
there is but one hope, he makes but one 
plea, — that of unmerited mercy. 



42 ATTITUDE OF THE MIND IN PRAYER. 

This is the true and only attitude of the 
mind in acceptable prayer, — a humbling 
sense of our own unworthiness, intensified 
by a realizing sense of the glorious perfec- 
tion and majesty of God. 




VII. 



LACKING. 



(Mark x. 17-22.) 

TF a grocer sends us a parcel of sugar, or a 
■*• merchant sends us a piece of cloth, and 
it lacks something of the just weight or 
measure, we are rightly indignant. Per- 
haps there is no species of fraud that excites 
such general disapprobation and scorn, as 
cheating by means of short weights and 
measures. The trader who practises it is 
branded with infamy. A community that 
tolerates such dealings is looked upon with 
contempt. 

Why is it that we have such a different 
standard of judging, when we speak of re- 
ligious matters? If a man murders, or blas- 
phemes, or does some act of outrageous sin, 
we all condemn him as a sinner against 
God. That God should be angry at such a 



44 LACKING. 

man, approves itself to the conscience even 
of the worldly and the irreligious. But for 
the sin of lacking something of what is due 
to God, we have none of that strong instinct- 
ive feeling of condemnation that we have 
for the man who withholds full weight or 
measure in his dealings with his fellows. 

Here, I take it, is the great mistake that 
we all make in matters of religion. It was 
the mistake of the Pharisees : it is ours. 
We do not realize hozv much we owe to 
God. 

Let us endeavor to get from our own af- 
fairs some idea on this subject. 

If any thing is ours by purchase, a beast 
of burden for instance, we feel that whatever 
service it is capable of rendering belongs to 
us, as much as does the money in our purse. 
If any thing is ours by the labor of our hands, 
or by the exercise of our skill, as when we 
invent and make a machine, or when we 
cultivate the fruits of the ground, we feel 
that our right is still stronger, and that who- 
ever should withhold or debar us from its 
use would do us a great wrong. Were it 
possible for us to do a work of actual cre- 
ation, and by inherent powers of our own to 



LACKING. 45 

produce out of nothing materials for service, 
our right to them would be stronger still. 
It would be of the very highest kind con- 
ceivable or possible. 

Now this is the right which God has to 
the service of his creatures. There is not a 
faculty of our souls, not a function of our 
bodies, not a dollar of our worldly estate, 
not a moment of our time, that is not his, to 
the fullest extent of its exercise, and by the 
most absolute rights of ownership. Just so 
far as we fail to love him with our whole 
heart, soul, mind, and strength ; just so far 
as we fail to hold our property to the last 
cent, our time to the last moment, our ener- 
gies to their utmost capacity, subject to his 
supreme and absolute disposal ; just so far 
as we fail to use them all, always, fully, 
freely, and with the highest alacrity and joy, 
in his appointed service, — just so far are we 
guilty of the crime of the man who uses 
short weights and measures in dealing with 
his fellows, only with an inconceivable de- 
gree of aggravation in our guilt. 

Let us once rise to the conception of this 
stupendous truth, and we shall begin to re- 
alize that we may be great sinners, without 



46 LACKING. 

being murderers, thieves, libertines, or 
drunkards. God says, Thou shalt, as well 
as, Thou shalt not: he requires, as well as 
forbids. If we owed an amount of money 
w T hich, represented by gold, would equal in 
size the Andes or the Himalayas, how ter- 
rible would be our sense of failure, had we 
only a few grains of gold dust to offer in 
payment ! Yet the disproportion here is not 
greater than that between the little that we 
do for God and the almost infinite that we 
leave undone. The few grains of service 
that we offer may be all genuine. But what 
are they to the infinite extent of our obliga- 
tion? In honesty of dealing, in' deeds of 
kindness and benevolence, in general amia- 
bleness of character, we may be all that the 
young ruler was, who ran kneeling to Jesus. 
But when we come to the question, What 
lack I yet? we open an abyss, the bottom of 
which no human plummet has sounded ; we 
look down from a precipice into depths from 
which reason recoils affrighted. 

Lacking? What is there in which we 
would not be found wanting, were the 
standard of unerring truth once applied, 
either to our heart or to our conduct? How 



LACKING. 47 

soon this amiable young ruler stood self- 
convicted, when Jesus applied the crucial 
test to a single trait of character ! He had 
great possessions, and he loved them more 
than he loved God. He was sad, and went 
away grieved, when told to give up all his 
earthly treasures, and to be content with a 
treasure in heaven. 

Many a reader of the gospel doubtless has 
been disposed to think, if not to say, that 
Jesus was harsh and exacting towards this 
young man, and many a hearer of the gos- 
pel now inwardly harbors the same thought 
towards those preachers who dwell upon the 
worthlessness of human merit. But when 
we once begin rightly to apprehend the ex- 
tent of God's claims upon us, we understand 
better why our Lord was so severe in his 
denunciation of spiritual pride, which was 
the sin of the Pharisees ; why self-righteous- 
ness, even in its mildest shape, as in the 
case of this young ruler, was to be cut up by 
the roots ; why humility and repentance 
stand so high in the catalogue of Christian 
graces. 

The publican and the prodigal, w 7 ith the 
cry upon their lips, K God, be merciful to me a 



48 LACKING. 

sinner," are nearer the kingdom than the 
most exemplary moralist, whose estimate of 
himself and of God only suggests to him 
the inquiry, What lack I yet? 




VIII. 

THE ALABASTER BOX OF PRECIOUS 
OINTMENT. 



(John xii. i-ii.) 

' I ^HE gospel nowhere encourages waste. 
Its precepts and its spirit lead to the 
habit of economy and thrift. Yet there is in 
the minds of some a mean, low standard of 
thrift, entirely alien to the spirit of the gos- 
pel. According to this standard, every thing 
is wasted that is not used for the supply of 
some gross material want, — for satisfying 
hunger, or for protecting the body from the 
cold. Even in the services of religion, 
every thing is counted wasteful that looks 
merely to ornament or elegance. Those 
who take such views of life would do well 
to study the transaction at that supper given 
to our Lord in Bethany, a few days before 
the crucifixion. 



50 THE ALABASTER BOX 

Judas had indeed some show of reason, 
when he exclaimed against the wastefulness 
of Mary on that occasion. Three hundred 
pennyworth just for a perfume ! The penn} 7 , 
or denarius, of that day, be it remembered, 
was the price of a day's labor. Three hun- 
dred days of hard toil spent in acquiring 
what was thus dissipated in a moment, in 
one lavish act ! Why pour out the whole 
pound, when a thimble-full, a single drop, 
was all-sufficient? Or, to give the matter a 
modern application, why spend five hun- 
dred dollars on a communion-service of 
costly silver, when ordinary cups and plates 
would answer every necessary purpose? 
Why lavish so many tens of thousands of 
dollars in making the house of worship 
artistically beautiful, when a barn, prop- 
erly warmed, lighted, and seated, would 
answer every material purpose of hearing 
and seeing? 

Fault-finding, such as this, springs some- 
times from dishonesty, as in the case of 
Judas. The people who utter such com- 
plaints are not the ones who are specially 
known for their liberality to the poor. The 
very men who grind the faces of the poor 



OF PRECIOUS OINTMENT. 5 1 

are wont to excuse their own stinginess and 
hardness of heart by exclaiming against 
the extravagant splendor of places of wor- 
ship. The poor man who needs help knows 
well enough that he will find it, not in the 
sanctimonious Judas, who cries out at this 
extravagance and waste, but in the loving 
Mary, who feels that nothing is too good or 
too costly for showing honor to her Lord. 
Those who find their highest happiness in 
honoring Christ's service with the best that 
they have, are the very ones most to be re- 
lied on for taking care of Christ's poor. If 
you hear that some rich lady has presented 
her church with a communion-service of 
unusual beauty and value, or has taken upon 
herself to furnish the pulpit, or some other 
part of the house of worship, in a style 
beyond the ordinary means of the congre- 
gation, and that not in a spirit of ostentation, 
but in a spirit of grateful love to the Lord 
that bought her, and with a desire to do 
honor to his service, it will be strange in- 
deed, if, on further inquiry, you do not find 
that same hand most freely open to the wants 
of the deserving poor. 

There is another class of grumblers about 



52 THE ALABASTER BOX 

waste. They are not, like Judas, dishonest. 
They are sincere in their complaints. They 
really see no use in much of the expenditure 
for religious purposes, and they think it a 
wrongful waste. Utility, in their view, 
means merely such things as pertain to the 
coarse necessities of nature. They can see 
a propriety in having a house of worship 
suitably warmed and ventilated, and in hav- 
ing the seats made comfortable, because 
such things conduce to health. But they 
do not understand how mere matters of light 
and shade, color, form, and proportion, about 
which architects make such a fuss, and 
which cost so much money, should have 
any effect on the mind of the worshipper. 
If they had had the making of the world, 
they would not have wasted so much skill 
as the Maker has done, in painting the lily 
of the field or giving the bird of paradise his 
gorgeous plumage. Such people forget that 
man has other needs, besides that of keeping 
the breath of life in the body, — that he has 
spiritual wants and capacities, and that these 
are fed and ministered to by what is beau- 
tiful, refined, elegant, or inspiring. The. 
rich chromos that adorn the walls of your 



OF PRECIOUS OINTMENT. 53 

Sunday-school room, the pretty blue and 
gold bindings of your Sunday-school books, 
have their utilities, as much as the birds and 
the flowers wherewith God has made the 
meadows to abound. 

If Mary had lavished that costly perfume 
on her own person, for the mere purpose of 
feminine vanity and display, to make her- 
self more agreeable or attractive, we might 
well have joined in crying out at the waste. 
But it was an act of generous devotion, 
showing, as no mere words could show, 
how strong was her love. Our Lord ac- 
cepted it as such, and has given it a note of 
commendation, the most remarkable per- 
haps in the whole gospel history. While 
the world stands, this deed of generous sac- 
rifice and of loving devotion to the Saviour 
shall live in remembrance ; and shall con- 
tinue for all generations to teach that 
whatever earthly possession is most costly 
and precious, has then its highest use, 
when made to conduce to the honoring of 
Christ. 



IX. 

THE THINGS THAT BELONG TO 
CAESAR. 



(Matthew xxii. 15-22.) 

TS education one of those things that be- 
-*■ long to Caesar? or does it belong to that 
other kingdom which God has set up in the 
world? or is it one of those things which 
belong partly to one and partly to the other 
of those organizations? There is no more 
grave or practical question than this before 
the Christian community at the present time. 
The Pope claims for the Church the ex- 
clusive control of education in all its depart- 
ments, and denounces secular education as 
irreligious and subversive of Christianity. 
This claim is distinctly set forth in a late 
manifesto by his ablest English spokesman, 
Archbishop Manning ; and there is little 
doubt that the Roman Catholic Bishops, 



THE THINGS, ETC. 55 

now convened in (Ecumenical Council, 
will be authoritatively instructed to pre- 
sent and push this issue all over the world. 
In this Western world especially, which has 
become the home of so many members of 
the Roman Catholic Church, the question is 
about to assume larger proportions than 
ever before . Premonitions , indeed , of a com- 
ing struggle are already visible, as in the 
monstrous results just reached in Cincinnati, 
whereby the Bible has been totally excluded 
from the public schools of that city. The 
Roman Catholic priests, who mainly brought 
about that result, had for their ulterior ob- 
ject to strengthen the appeal to their own 
people for schools which should be under 
their own exclusive control. The argument 
runs thus : ?? These public schools are neces- 
sarily godless schools. Learning divorced 
from religion is Satanic. If your children 
attend these schools, they will grow up 
irreligious and godless. We must there- 
fore have schools in which the priests shall 
choose the teachers and direct the course of 
study." Such is the substance of the argu- 
ment, as addressed to their own people. 
That they will not be idle in pressing their 



56 THE THINGS 

claim, may be inferred from the fact, now 
clearly ascertained, that vast numbers of 
Roman Catholic children who attend the 
common schools are annually lost to that 
church, and become Protestants. It is a 
matter of life and death with the priests to 
stop this process of leakage. 

It is not without significance in this mat- 
ter, that, in nearly all our Protestant com- 
munions, that section of each which is known 
as High Church in its tendencies is likewise 
opposed to common schools. 

Let us look this question in the face. A 
protracted and wide-spread controversy is 
about to be sprung upon us, and it is best to 
come to some clear and well-defined views 
in regard to it. 

Education, then, is an exceedingly com- 
prehensive term. It includes learning how 
to make brick as well as learning how 
to spell. Every trade and profession has its 
teachers and lessons, and requires its season 
of apprenticeship. When, therefore, the 
church, Protestant or Roman Catholic, 
claims the exclusive control and direction 
of education, on the ground that there is 
something religious and sacred about it, the 



THAT BELONG TO CAESAR. 57 

claim breaks down by its own weight, unless 
the term is very considerably restricted. If 
the argument proves any thing, it proves too 
much. If it is no part of the business of the 
church to teach how to make brick, or to 
make shoes, or to plant corn, is it any more 
its business to teach penmanship and draw- 
ing, or to initiate the ignorant in the mys- 
teries of arithmetic and grammar? Is there 
any thing religious in the rules of syntax, or 
in the multiplication-table? 

The answer which our Lord gave to the 
Pharisees concedes that there are some 
things which rightly belong to Caesar. Is 
not the instruction of the young in the com- 
mon branches of knowledge one of these? 
There are indeed certain things which the 
young ought to be taught, matters of reli- 
gious faith and duty, which they must learn 
from their appointed religious teachers. But 
let us draw the line between religious knowl- 
edge and secular knowledge. Let the 
church, through its Sunday schools and its 
other appropriate agencies, attend to the 
training of the young in religious knowledge. 
It has no higher or more imperative duty. 
But let it leave instruction in grammar and 



58 THE THINGS 

arithmetic, botany and chemistry, mechanics 
and engineering, to the care of the people in 
their organized capacity as a civil society. 
If we undertake to say that the State, as 
such, cannot teach those branches of com- 
mon knowledge to our children, and there- 
fore throw the burden of it upon the church, 
we put upon the church more than it can do, 
or ever has done. If we are to have no 
schools for teaching the common branches of 
secular knowledge but those maintained by 
the various churches, or by voluntary socie- 
ties, the mass of the children will grow up 
in profound ignorance, just as they now do, 
and ever have done, in those countries where 
this detestable dogma has had sway. If 
Protestants want the people of these United 
States to sink into the condition of the people 
of the Papal States, where all primary edu- 
cation is in the hands of the priesthood, all 
we have to do is to admit the starting-point 
of their argument, that knowledge by itself, 
unaccompanied by religion, is an evil. 

It does not follow that the schools sup- 
ported by the State are godless schools, 
because they do not undertake to teach re- 
ligious truth. The schools get their impress, 



THAT BELONG TO C^SAR. 59 

not so much from their curriculum of study, 
as from the character of the teachers. And 
who are our teachers? They are not hea- 
thens, imported from Africa or Asia, but 
men and women taken from the heart of the 
Christian church. Nine-tenths of all the 
teachers of common schools in the United 
States are godly men and women, members 
of Christian churches. The most note- 
worthy feature in the late national conven- 
tion of teachers at Trenton was the marked 
religious and Christian character of the as- 
sembly. The Principal of every Normal 
school in the United States is a professing 
Christian ; and most of these men, who have 
so largely the training of our teachers, are 
eminently religious. The same is true to a 
large extent with our State and County Super- 
intendents. It is, in fact, a religious instinct, 
a drawing of the heart towards the w r ork, 
more than the mere emoluments of office, 
which has filled the ranks of the profession 
with its ablest members. Now it is absurd 
to suppose that children who all day long, 
for five days of the week, are under the 
direct personal influence of warm-hearted 
Christian men and women, are to be thereby 



60 THE THINGS 

demoralized and heathenized, because these 
men and women teach them that seven times 
nine are sixty-three, without at the same 
time teaching them some peculiar doctrine 
of revelation. 

It is the duty of men, in their organized 
capacity as a civil society, to provide for- the 
training of the young in the common branches 
of knowledge, because this is incomparably 
the cheapest and most efficient, and, in fact, 
the only adequate agency for the accomplish- 
ment of this necessary end. What could a 
few parochial schools, and a few private 
schools, scattered about here and there, ac- 
complish towards the universal education of 
a great people, numbering forty millions? 
The money raised by tax in the United 
States for popular education, though still 
lamentably deficient, far exceeds all the 
moneys raised by all the churches of the land, 
for every kind of religious and charitable 
purpose. If the Methodists, the Baptists, 
the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, the 
Congregationalists, and the various other 
religious bodies were to stop all their mis- 
sionary, Bible, and tract operations, and 
every other form of benevolent activity, and 



THAT BELONG TO C^SAR. 6l 

throw all the moneys now raised for these 
purposes, and all that by special high pres- 
sure they could raise in addition, into one 
purse, they could not even begin to meet the 
expenses of a system of schools adequate to 
the education of the community. I cannot 
at this moment quote the exact amount now 
expended for this purpose in the United 
States and raised by popular taxation. But 
it cannot be less certainly than fifty millions 
of dollars annually. Is the church compe- 
tent to undertake such a burden as this? 
The thing is absurd. If the work of primary 
education is done at all, with any real 
efficiency, it must be done by the State. 
There is no other power adequate to the 
work; and by the State, I mean, as I have 
before said, the people, acting in their 
organized capacity as a civil society. 



X. 



OUR FATHER. 

(Matthew vi. 6-13.) 

"]\ /TANY essays, sermons, books even, have 
^ been written to show the duty and pro- 
priety of prayer. There is a natural yearn- 
ing of the human heart, when in distress, to 
make its wants known to some superior 
power and intelligence. But as our knowl- 
edge of the amazing extent of the material 
universe becomes enlarged, and we attain 
more definite apprehensions of the infinite 
majesty and greatness of God, as the Being 
who not only fills and governs this vast uni- 
verse, but who somehow lives and acts in un- 
comprehended grandeur, far, far in the dim 
abysses of being, beyond the utmost verge 
of the created universe, the mind shrinks 
from the idea of addressing its poor, puny 
thoughts to such a God. What can He 



OUR FATHER. 6$ 

who before there was any earth or moon or 
sun or star or matter, before there was any 
created man or angel or spirit, far back in 
the depths of a fathomless past eternity, 
existed alone in perfect and indescribable 
happiness and glory ; who now lives equally 
and mysteriously alone, in regions beyond 
the reach of thought, and outside of all cre- 
ated matter and spirit, as well as within the 
universe which he has made, — what can He, 
this infinite I AM, care for me f How shall 
I dare come before him with my small and 
insignificant affairs? Suppose a child in 
Carter's Alley should send a letter to the 
Emperor Napoleon, or to the Czar of all the 
Russias, asking his assistance in finding a 
top or a pin which had been lost in its little 
attic, or asking interposition against the teas- 
ing of some play-fellow : the supposition 
would not be the thousandth part as absurd 
as it seems for me to invoke the help of the 
great God in all the little worries and frets of 
my daily life ! 

Against this cheerless, cowardly, infidel 
thought of God, this freezing dissuasive 
against prayer to him, what argument does 
Jesus put into our mouths? Is it something 



64 OUR FATHER. 

metaphysical and abstruse? Must we first 
be able to understand how answer to prayer 
is possible, in a universe where every thing 
is already fixed and predetermined? When 
God proclaimed the ten commandments on 
Mount Sinai, he began by asserting his 
right to give such a law. Before saying 
what the people should do, and what they 
should not do, he says, in effect, I have a per- 
fect right to lay down a law for you : M I am 
the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of 
the land of Egypt, out of the house of bond- 
age." As this preface to the ten command- 
ments, asserting God's supreme authority 
as the Creator and Redeemer of his people, 
contains an epitome of all that can be said 
to enforce the real obligation of the moral 
law, so the first words that Jesus puts into 
our mouth, in that form of prayer which he 
taught his disciples, contains all the argu- 
ment that we need, all perhaps that we can 
understand, to enforce the duty, or to con- 
vince us of the efficacy, of prayer. 

"Our Father!" Gracious, assuring, won- 
derful words ! If God is my father ', what 
other argument do I need, to authorize me 
to go to him ? Will a father give a stone to 



OUR FATHER. 65 

a child asking for bread, or a scorpion to 
one asking for a fish? Will a father turn a 
deaf ear to a child that is repentant? Does 
the greatness of a father's affairs ever make 
him look with unconcern upon even the 
infantile prattle, the veriest triflings, of his 
own offspring? Would the supplication of 
that very child in Carter's Alley have been 
at all out of place, had he really been the 
son of Napoleon or of the Czar? When 
Jesus tells us, with full and unquestioning 
authority, to begin our prayer by saying, 
** Our Father," he makes known an august 
and most wonderful truth in regard to the 
nature of God and our relations to him ; 
and this truth is at once our warrant, and 
our encouragement, to go to our Father in 
heaven, in all our manifold distresses and 
perplexities, with the same freedom of spirit 
and the same certainty of success, that we 
go to an earthly parent. 

The argument for prayer, drawn from 
these words of the Saviour, may doubtless 
be reduced to the formula of a logical syllo- 
gism, just as by logic we may prove our 
own existence, "I think, therefore I am;" 
or just as an Edwards, by a volume of rigid 

5 



66 OUR FATHER. 

demonstration enduring as the pyramids, 
may prove the co-existence of necessity and 
free will ; and such arguments may perhaps 
be necessary for the vindication of the truth, 
and may even help certain classes of minds 
in practical duty. But, blessed be God, 
it is by no such subtile process as this that 
ordinary men, the toiling millions all over 
the earth, and in all ages of the world, must 
learn the truths of their own existence, or 
the duty and the privilege of prayer. No 
man can take upon his lips these precious 
words, "Our Father who art in Heaven," 
with an intelligent comprehension of what 
those words imply, without having already in 
his heart, springing up from the lowest 
depths of his own consciousness, all the argu- 
ments he needs to persuade him to pray. It 
is an appeal that comes home at once to all 
alike, the young and the old, the ignorant 
and the learned. 

The fact that the infinite God bears to the 
human race a relation which may be prop- 
erly represented by the relation of a father 
to children, is a great and sublime truth. 
It is in itself a whole compend of divinity. 
Natural religion does not teach this truth, 



OUR FATHER. 67 

or, if at all, only dimly and uncertainly. It 
is a peculiar doctrine of revelation. And 
how wise have been the means for making 
this foundation doctrine of Christianity as 
universal as the air ! Daily, for more than 
eighteen centuries, in every continent and 
clime where Christ has been known, in 
every Christian church, whatever its name 
or nation, in every Christian household, and 
on every lip, from that of lisping infancy to 
that of tremulous old age, the most familiar 
household words have been these : " Our 
Father who art in heaven ; " and thus the 
precious truth which they contain has be- 
come unconsciously, from the very dawn of 
rational existence, one of the practical beliefs 
of the race. We may indeed argue ourselves 
into a theoretical scepticism on this subject. 
But, practically, the two hundred millions 
of the race, who daily repeat our Lord's 
Prayer, no more doubt that God is their 
Father, and that it is therefore a privilege 
and a duty to pray to him, than they doubt 
that they themselves exist, or that they are 
free agents. 



XL 



CONSOLATION. 

(John ix. 34-38.) 

nr^HE true secret of consolation in sorrow 
"*■ is to give the mind something else to 
think about. A mind in deep affliction 
dwells upon that which causes its anguish, 
magnifies its proportions, and multiplies 
its horrors, until the thoughts are wholly 
occupied with it. With what consummate 
skill Shakspeare embodies this idea in his 
description of Lady Constance's grief at the 
separation from her son : — 

" Cardinal, I have heard you say, 
That we shall see and know our friends in heaven : 
If that be true, I shall see my boy again ; 
For, since the birth of Cain, the first male child, 
To him that did but yesterday suspire, 
There was not such a gracious creature born. 
But now will canker sorrow eat my bud, 
And chase the native beauty from his cheek, 
And he will look as hollow as a ghost, 



CONSOLATION. 69 

As dim and meagre as an ague's fit; 
And so he'll die; and, rising so again, 
When I shall meet him in the court of heaven, 
I shall not know him : therefore never, never 
Must I behold my pretty Arthur more." 

When expostulated with for this excess 
and told that she is nursing her grief in- 
stead of trying to dismiss it, her reply is, ■ — 

" Grief fills the room up of my absent child, 
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me; 
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, 
Remembers me of all his gracious parts, 
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form : 
Then have I reason to be fond of grief." 

The arguments and expostulations of the 
King and of the Cardinal only aggravate 
her anguish, and cause her to dwell upon it 
with a sort of insane infatuation. 

So it is always with arguments pointing 
directly to the objects of our sorrow, and 
aiming to make us feel the anguish less by 
disparaging the cause, or calling upon us 
to suppress our heart-ache by a mere act of 
will. Such a process is in violation of all 
the laws of mental action. We might as 
well seek to forget a thing by resolving to 
forget it. The very resolution to forget 
brings the thing into our mind ; and the 



70 CONSOLATION. 

more vigorous the resolve, the more vivid is 
the recollection. 

Surcease from sorrow is to be looked for, 
not in the vain attempt to dam the surging 
flood, but in finding some other channel for 
the outflow of the waters, in giving the 
mind some other occupation for its powers, 
— in resorting to what Chalmers signifi- 
cantly calls " the expulsive power of a new 
affection." A friend of mine, a man of letters, 
once met a sore disappointment, the failure 
to win a position on which he had set his 
mind for years, and which he valued more 
than any professional prize that had ever 
been set before him. Finding that his dis- 
appointment was weighing upon him, and 
unable otherwise to throw off the burden of 
his sorrow, he forthwith announced a course 
of public lectures, to begin on the following 
week, though not a word of the course was 
written, and not even the preliminary study 
for such a course had been made. It was a 
bold experiment; but, in the relief which it 
gave to his own mind, it was entirely suc- 
cessful. The die was cast. His profes- 
sional reputation was at stake. He was 
obliged to bestir himself instantly, day and 



CONSOLATION. 7l 

night, to the work of preparation; and 
under the excitement of the intense mental 
occupation which ensued, hardly a month 
had passed before he had almost forgotten 
what it was supposed would be a life-long 
sorrow. The new mental affection had 
expelled the old. 

We cannot brood upon the past when 
obliged to put forth our whole powers in a 
struggle with the present. Whatever ear- 
nestly engages the thoughts, outside of the 
current of our grief, is a consoler. It 
expels what we desire to forget, by filling 
us with something else. A taste from the 
cup of joy is the true remedy for one who 
has drunk of the gall. When Kirke White 
was on the borders of despair, he cast ofT 
his despondency, not by trying to persuade 
himself that there was no blackness in the 
clouds which were about him, not by shut- 
ting his eyes and making believe there was 
no trouble or danger, but by looking boldly 
up, above and beyond the billows and the 
clouds, to the bright star of hope shining 
serenely in the heavens. 

" Once on the raging seas I rode, 
The storm was loud, the night was dark, 



72 CONSOLATION. 

The ocean yawned and rudely blowed 
The wind that tossed my foundering bark. 

Deep horror then my vitals froze ; 
Death-struck I ceased the tide to stem ; 

When suddenly a star arose, 
It was the star of Bethlehem. 

It was my guide, my light, my all ; 
It bade my dark forebodings cease ; 

And through the storm and danger's thrall, 
It led me to the port of peace." 

The true way to comfort a sinner, when 
under distress of mind from the conviction 
of sin, is, not to underrate the heinousness 
of his sins, but to hold up before him the 
excellency of Christ, to fill his mind with 
thoughts of Christ, to fill his hands with 
work for Christ, to give him active Chris- 
tian employment, — to set before him some- 
thing to do, and something to think about, 
that shall engage his whole energies of 
heart, mind, and soul, in the cause of 
Christ. 

When the blind man had been cast out of 
the synagogue by the malignant Pharisees 
(John ix. 34-38), our Saviour did not com- 
fort him by assuring him that it was a small 
calamity to be a social and religious outcast. 
Excommunication at that day put a man 



CONSOLATION. 73 

in a condition hardly less dreadful than 
that of the woman now who by her own 
crime has become a wretched f? outcast " 
from her sex. Jesus knew well that the 
Pharisees had the poor blind man in their 
power, and that by the ecclesiastical and 
social machinery at their disposal they 
could drive the iron into his soul, — could 
make him a pariah, with whom not even 
the lepers would associate. Jesus does not 
deny or depreciate these terrors, but gives 
the man a glimpse of something infinitely 
more glorious and more satisfying within 
his reach, — a vision of heavenly hope such 
as carried Kirke White triumphantly over 
the dark waters, a foretaste of bliss such as 
made him forget the bitterness of the cup 
put to his lips. Nowhere in his earthly 
ministry, to no one of his countrymen, not 
even to his chosen disciples, did our Lord 
make a more clear and explicit declaration 
of his glorious Messiahship than to this 
poor man, and that as a means of comfort- 
ing him in his distress. "Dost thou be- 
lieve on the Son of God ? " " Who is he, 
Lord, that I might believe on him?" 
"Thou hast both seen him, audit is he that 



74 CONSOLATION. 

talketh with thee!" Blessed assurance! 
Satisfying consolation ! To have seen the 
long-expected Messiah ! That was enough. 
What cares the man now for the scorns and 
the contumely of the malignant world about 
him? Solomon, in all his glory, would have 
come down from his throne, to be for one 
moment in the place of this poor outcast, 
seeing with his very eyes the form, hearing 
with his very ears the voice, of the great 
expected Messiah, the incarnate Son of 
God ! 

Here, Christian, is our sure consolation. 
In every hour of anguish and of sorrow, let 
us think of the joy that is set before us, 
looking to Jesus ! 

A foretaste of Heaven is the true water 
of Lethe for the bitterness of earth. 




XII. 

JESUS AT TABLE. 

(Luke xiv. 1-24.) 

COME of the most important and critical 
^ acts of life are connected with the table. 
Many of the virtues, personal, domestic, 
social, and religious, have at the domestic 
board their most fitting place for exercise. 
It is a school for the practice and cultivation 
of temperance, hospitality, refined conver- 
sation, decorum of manners, courtesy, mod- 
esty, condescension, unselfishness, and in 
general all those graceful amenities which 
give a charm to life. The Evangelists have 
recorded what Jesus said and did at table 
with the same minuteness with which they 
have recorded his sayings and doings in the 
temple and the synagogue ; and his example 
in this respect, as in others, is worthy of our 
devout study. A chapter on the "Table- 



j6 JESUS AT TABLE. 

talk" of Jesus, and the familiar domestic 
scenes connected with it, would form, indeed, 
a most valuable addition to the literature of 
home-life. Let us dwell for a moment upon 
one of these scenes, as recorded in the four- 
teenth chapter of Luke. 

Our Lord on this occasion went to the 
house of another to eat bread on the Sab- 
bath. The record does not give us the idea 
that it was a sumptuous entertainment, a 
banquet, like some which he attended on 
other occasions. The Jews (Exodus xxxv. 
3) kindled no fire in their dwellings on the 
Sabbath, all the food for the occasion having 
been cooked on the day previous (Exodus 
xvi. 23). A social gathering, therefore, did 
not necessarily imply any of that unnecessary 
labor by which the Sabbath is desecrated. 
At the same time, it is evident from the 
narrative that Jesus was not the only guest 
on this occasion. Others are expressly 
mentioned as being present. Most likely 
he had been preaching in the synagogue, 
and after the service was over, being a 
stranger in the place, he, with his disciples, 
was invited home to dinner by " one of the 
chief Pharisees ;" and others, "lawyers and 



JESUS AT TABLE. 77 

Pharisees," were invited to meet him. Such 
a gathering, therefore, cannot in itself be a 
breach of the Sabbath, or it would not have 
been sanctioned by the presence of our 
Lord. It may be made unholy, by worldly 
conversation, by debauch, by unnecessary 
labor and display in the entertainment. But, 
on the other hand, silence, solitariness, seclu- 
sion, gloom, asceticism in any of its forms, 
are no part of that sanctity by which the 
Sabbath is to be honored. A glad face, tell- 
ing of a thankful heart, a quiet and gentle 
outflow and intermingling of the domestic 
and social affections, are entirely compatible 
with the due observance of God's holy day, 
and are as honoring to him as they are 
profitable to us. Especially when away from 
home, -and subject to the noise and disquiet 
of a great hotel, we need not scruple, if in- 
vited, to eat bread on the Sabbath in some 
quiet, Christian household, or fear lest there- 
by we give countenance to those who make 
the day a season for ordinary visiting and 
recreation. 

The "chief Pharisee," who exercised the 
rites of hospitality on this occasion, was no 
friend of Jesus ; neither w T ere the other 



^8 JESUS AT TABLE. 

guests, "the lawyers and Pharisees," who 
were present. This is evident, not only 
from the general course of the narrative, but 
from the introductory remark which begins 
the narrative. "They were watching him." 
Of course Jesus was not deceived by their 
show of kindness ; yet he accepted the 
proffered hospitality according to its ap- 
parent and obvious intent. Nor need we 
always be too curious as to the secret 
motives of those who invite us to their 
houses. Let us meet the courtesies and 
civilities of life according to their professed 
intent. If the profession is insincere and 
hypocritical, it harms the giver, not the 
receiver. Our acceptance of a proffered 
kindness may even be the means of dis- 
arming hostility. 

When Jesus sat at meat among his friends, 
or ate bread with one by whom he had been 
bidden, he talked with the assembled guests 
on various subjects, as the occasion sug- 
gested. Some of his most instructive dis- 
courses are* those which come from his lips 
in the intervals of eating at the family meal. 
His example is a silent rebuke of those who 
have no errand at table but to bolt their food. 



JESUS AT TABLE. 79 

Man, like the beasts, has indeed his animal 
wants. He must eat when hungry, and 
drink when thirsty, and the satisfying of 
these bodily appetites gives him pleasure. 
But there are pleasures of the table beyond 
that derived from mere eating and drinking, 
and the man who goes to his family meal 
only to gorge and guzzle is no better than 
the pig. Wise counsels as to the conduct 
of life, and familiar illustrations of duty and 
of truth, never fall more pleasantly on the 
ear than when uttered during the genial flow 
of kindness which marks the interchange of 
courtesies at the table. Not that a man 
should go to the table to deliver a lecture, or 
preach a sermon. But conversation, and 
that of a cheerful, attractive, and useful 
kind, is an essential part of the family meal. 
There should be a feast of reason as well 
as of the body. To the children of a house- 
hold, if it is rightly ordered, the table is as 
important a means of education as the school- 
room. Woe to the parent who suffers it to 
degenerate into a sty, or who does not 
make it the means of cultivating unself- 
ishness, courtesy of language and manners, 
modesty and filial duty. 



80 JESUS AT TABLE. 

Our Saviour marked two social tendencies, 
which, under other forms, perhaps, are yet 
really as common now as they were then. 
Those who were bidden to a feast were 
ambitious to occupy a conspicuous place at 
the table. Those who gave a feast were 
chiefly anxious to have for their guests such 
as were rich and noble. The object of the 
entertainment, with such persons, is not 
social enjoyment, but the display of social 
distinction. They wish, as guests, to show 
to all around, by the place assigned them, 
what important personages they are. They 
wish, as hosts, to show w r hat a brilliant 
company graces their saloons. Selfish dis- 
play, now as then, is the ruling motive of 
nine-tenths of what passes under the name 
of hospitality and social intercourse. If a 
tithe of the money spent in these extrava- 
gant and heartless displays, which only 
provoke bitterness and alienation, were 
spent in genuine benevolence, how differ- 
ent would society be. A man will spend 
a thousand dollars upon a single entertain- 
ment, whose only object is to display his 
plate, his pictures, his apartments, or his 
grounds ; while he turns a deaf ear to the 



. JESUS AT TABLE. 8l 

most urgent necessities of a poor relation, 
and would count it a great hardship to send 
a barrel of flour or a ton of coal to an unfor- 
tunate neighbor. 




XIII. 



THE CROSS. 



(Luke xiv. 25-33.) 

HT^HE extent to which any system of doc- 
"*- trine has become a part of the govern- 
ing ideas of the race is best shown by 
language. Just in proportion to the preva- 
lence of any doctrine do the special terms 
first used to illustrate it become a part of 
universal speech. What was at first a bold 
and startling metaphor becomes simply a 
common noun, an adjective, a verb, or a prep- 
osition. The word talent, meaning origin- 
ally simply a certain denomination of money, 
like byzant, or daric, or napoleon, or guinea, 
yet, in consequence of its use by our Lord in 
the parable of The Talents, has become, in 
all European languages, and to more than 
two hundred millions of human beings, 
simply a sign for abilities, or opportunities 



THE CROSS. 83 

of any kind. Simony shows the universal 
abhorrence of the Christian world of the 
crime of Simon Magus. No word, however, 
connected with Christian doctrine has en- 
tered so largely into the common speech of 
the race, as that which was originally simply 
the name for the instrument of torture by 
which our Saviour was put to death. It is 
not only found among nouns, adjectives, 
verbs, and adverbs, but has even become a 
preposition. We cannot speak of going 
a-cross the room without a silent reminder 
of the great central doctrine of Christianity. 
Our Saviour seems to have intended that 
this word should be thus used, by the fre- 
quency with which he himself thus employed 
it, even before the one event which gave it 
general significance. It must have sounded 
very strange to the disciples, when Jesus first 
began to speak to them of taking up the cross. 
It is as if a religious teacher now should say, 
No one can be my disciple unless he first 
hang from his gallows! The word "his," 
too, is significant. Jesus does not say, No 
one can be a follower of mine unless he bears 
the cross, — just as we would say, unless he 
goes to the gallows, — but unless he takes 



84 THE CROSS. 

up his cross. This phraseology does not 
sound so strangely now, because we have 
become accustomed to the idea. But then 
it was a new idea, that each one had a cross 
to bear, that every man who became a 
Christian had to be crucified, that every 
disciple had his cross. After the crucifixion 
of Jesus, and the manner in which this event 
was spoken of by the apostles, after it became 
accepted in the infant church as the cardinal 
fact of Christianity, the central point of 
Christian doctrine, such phraseology be- 
comes natural. We expect it in the Epis- 
tles, but in the Gospels it seems to be out 
of place. It is one of those significant and 
wondrous anticipations, in which our Lord, 
in talking to his disciples, used language 
purposely unintelligible to them then, but 
which became perfectly clear to their appre- 
hension after his death. 

It is worthy of notice that in at least one of 
the passages in which Jesus speaks of each 
one having "his cross" (Luke xiv. 26), 
domestic troubles were those primarily in 
view. The man who undertook to be a 
Christian, and to carry out his convictions, 
would encounter opposition and hostility 



THE CROSS. 85 

from those most dear to him by blood and 
marriage. He must often be obliged to 
choose between his convictions of duty on 
one side, and "father," "mother," "wife," 
"children," "brothers and sisters," on the 
other. "If any man come to me, and hate 
not his father and mother and wife and 
children and brethren and sisters, yea, and 
his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." 
Hate! It is a strong term, and a strange 
one, surely, on the lips of. Him who else- 
where teaches us to love our very enemies, 
and whose distinguishing character as a 
teacher is the proclamation of universal love 
and of the general brotherhood of man. 
Soften the expression as we may, there is 
something startling about it ; and the very 
least we can infer from it is, that when duty 
to Christ clearly points one way, and the 
dearest earthly love points elsewhere, we 
have met our cross, and we may not safely 
refuse to take it up. 

It may be, too, an intimation that the 
" cross" will be something of frequent occur- 
rence in the domestic relations. Is it alto- 
gether accidental that we use this very word 
to express almost all the frets and worries 



86 THE CROSS. 

and sharp encounters which sometimes mar 
domestic happiness? that when the hus- 
band is ill-natured, exacting, or oppressive, 
we call him cross? that we apply the 
same epithet to the wife when she scolds, 
and the baby when it frets, and the brothers 
and sisters when they disagree, and the ser- 
vants when they disobey? It is no straining 
of Christ's words to believe that when he 
used so general a formula as " whosoeyer 
doth not bear his cross," especially when it 
occurs immediately after the mention of these 
domestic relations, he had in view, among 
other and perhaps graver things, yet clearly 
just such troubles as occur daily in almost 
every household ; and he would have us 
meet these trials with the same spirit with 
w^hich he met his great trial. We may not 
shirk them. We may not fret over them. 
We may not count them accidental. 

The crosses hardest to bear are not those 
which occur in the great and conspicuous 
events of life. 



XIV. 



PRAYING FOR CHILDREN. 



(Matthew xv. 21-28.) 

T T 7HAT motives are right, as a propelling 
* * power, in leading us to cry mightily 
to God for the salvation of others ? Is there 
any irreverence in our being thus moved by 
the mere warmth of natural affection. Is 
there any impropriety in an importunacy 
which springs from mere human love? 

The case of the Syro-Phoenician woman 
would seem to settle this question, even if 
we were to ignore all the other multiplied 
instances of the same sort, in both the Old 
Testament and the New. That which im- 
pelled this woman to pursue the Saviour, and 
to cry unto him, almost to the point of rude- 
ness, until even the disciples seemed worried 
out with her, was a strong and yearning 
maternal affection, which would take no 



88 PRAYING FOR CHILDREN. 

denial. So passionate is this love for her 
child, that she cries, "Have mercy," not on 
her, as the reader would expect, but "on 
me" as though, in the extreme of parental 
fondness, the mother had been merged in 
the daughter. She makes her child's misery 
her own. When apparently repulsed by 
the cold reminder of her Canaanitish origin, 
she presses still more closely into his pres- 
ence, elbows aside the crowd, and falling 
upon the ground immediately before the Sa- 
viour, as a drowning man grasps at anj' thing 
within reach, — with one more passionate 
appeal, cries, "Lord, help me ! " When told 
in effect that she was but a dog, unworthy 
of help, she turns even this epithet into an 
argument. "Yea, Lord, thou sayest true; 
it is not right to take the children's bread 
and give it unto the dogs, for the dogs eat 
of the crumbs, that fall from their master's 
table. Let me therefore have, not bread, 
but only crumbs, the mere leavings, and do 
not give me even them, but let me -pick tip 
what falls from the table ! " 

Did ever a mother cry more passionately 
to the Governor of the State for the pardon 
of a child imprisoned for crime? Did our 



PRAYING FOR CHILDREN. 89 

Saviour, either here, or in any other like 
instance, give the least sign that this depth 
of passionate attachment was displeasing to 
him? Were not his apparent repulses and 
rebuffs intended to draw out and exhibit the 
strength of the mother's love, as well as of 
her faith? And has he not now the same 
human compassion that he had when a 
weary traveller among the hills of Judea? 

Mother, father, Sunday-school teacher, is 
there some little one towards whom your 
soul goes forth with passionate fondness, 
whose very life is bound up in your life, in 
crying for whose salvation you almost uncon- 
sciously say, "Lord, have mercy on me!" 
"Lord, help me!" Should you withhold 
that appeal, for fear of obtruding your mere 
human love upon the notice of the Redeemer? 
Is he not expressly made known to us as one 
who can be touched with a feeling of our 
human infirmities and affections? And shall 
we withhold from him our agonizing cry for 
the salvation of the children? 



XV. 



DEAF AND DUMB. 



(Mark vii. 31-37.) 

|"T is not by accident, or by idle habit, that 
•*■ these two words go together. In the 
case of deaf people, the deafness is the cause 
of the dumbness. Deaf people have all the 
organs of speech, the same as other people. 
These organs are indeed in an undeveloped, 
rudimentary condition ; but they are there. 
The deaf man does not speak, because he 
does not hear. It is by the ear that we 
learn to distinguish sounds, and to guide our 
own voices into articulate speech. 

A man may indeed have a finely culti- 
vated ear, both for speech and for music, 
and yet not be either a good speaker or a 
good singer. His vocal organs may not 
have that natural superiority of formation 
which is needed for excellence in these 



DEAF AND DUMB. 9 1 

departments, or he maybe wanting in appli- 
cation and in the ambition to excel. But, 
while a cultivated ear does not necessarily 
imply a cultivated voice, there is, on the other 
hand, no possibility of cultivating the voice 
except through the ear. An accomplished 
vocalist without a cultivated ear is an im- 
possibility. Hence, the first step in teaching 
either music or elocution is to train the ear of 
the pupil to the nice discrimination of sounds. 
The pupil hears a particular sound made by 
others, and then exerts his own voice in 
the formation of sounds, until he succeeds in 
making a sound which his ear recognizes as 
exactly like the one he is imitating. By 
these means the vocal organs are trained, 
until he can produce at will any articulate 
sound, or any musical note, which the mind 
desires. 

It is observable, too, in the case of persons 
who lose their hearing gradually, that they 
lose, if not vocal power, yet the power of 
guiding and controlling vocal expression. 
The late Dr. William McDowell, a Presby- 
terian preacher of considerable eminence, 
became in the latter part of his life nearly 
deaf. While in this state, he continued for 



92 DEAF AND DUMB. 

a time to preach ; but his preaching became 
at length so painful to his auditors, that he 
was obliged to give it up. He endeavored to 
govern his utterance by his recollection of 
how his tongue, lips, epiglottis, larynx, and 
other organs of speech, had been moved in 
former times : but having no ear any longer 
to guide him, he made the most painful and 
ludicrous mistakes, his voice going up or 
down, loud or low, piping or bellowing, in 
the most capricious manner, so as to upset 
all one's sense of decorum. 

Deafness, blindness, lameness, leprosy, 
demoniacal possession, every disease that 
was miraculously cured by our Saviour 
while upon the earth, not only was thus a 
testimony to his divine power and benevo- 
lence, but is also, by a coincidence which 
can hardly be otherwise than intentional, an 
emblem of the moral condition and wants of 
every one of us. Every one of us is by 
nature deaf, blind, impotent, leprous, pos- 
sessed with an evil spirit. We are deaf to 
the voice of God and of conscience, calling 
us to repentance. We hear not the warn- 
ings which sound trumpet-tongued in our 
ears. The great alarming facts of our con- 



DEAF AND DUMB. 93 

dition, which seem to be awful enough to 
awaken one from the dead, make no more 
impression upon our consciences than the 
mutterings of the thunder or of the earth- 
quake upon the deaf man. How crude, 
moreover, are our attempts at religious ser- 
vice, how jangled and out of tune is our voice 
in its expressions of pious emotion, until the 
Saviour opens the ears of our spiritual under- 
standing ! 

The Sunday-school teacher has something 
more to do than to spread out before his 
scholars the treasures of knowledge. He 
must remember that his pupils are by nature 
deaf to spiritual things, and that no amount 
or variety of religious instruction will avail 
to their conversion, unless by the special 
grace of the Holy Ghost those deaf ears are 
opened. Let him imitate, therefore, those 
who of old on the borders of the Lake of 
Galilee brought their deaf friend to Jesus 
and invoked his interposition. He is just as 
ready now, as he was then, to open the ears 
of the deaf. He is just as ready now to 
remove spiritual, as he was then to remove 
bodily, deafness. He is the same compas- 
sionate, all-powerful Saviour. To him, there- 



94 DEAF AND DUMB. 

fore, should our cry continually go up. To 
his presence should we bring our scholars, 
by importunate, unceasing prayer, knowing 
well that all our teaching will be vain until 
to every sin-closed ear he says the gracious 
word, Ephphatha ! Be thou opened! 

As "deaf" and "dumb" invariably go 
together, so the opened ear should invari- 
ably be followed by the loosened tongue. 
No impulse is more natural than for the soul 
that is truly converted to speak the praises 
of its Redeemer. If medical skill should 
ever achieve the wonderful result of giving 
hearing to the deaf, how busy would we see 
the newly healed in training their tongues to 
articulate sounds ! Such exactly is the ef- 
fect whenever there is any great and powerful 
revival of religion ! How the tongues of the 
people are unloosed in the prayer-meeting ! 
How fresh and joyous is the voice of song 
in the great congregation ! 




XVI. 



THE MIRACLE OF FOOD. 



(Matthew xv. 32-39.) 

'TPHERE is no more of power in the most 
-*■ stupendous of the miracles recorded in 
Scripture than in any one of the millions 
of natural occurrences which are taking 
place every day, all around us. That which 
takes place in the case of a miracle is ex- 
ceptional only in the fact that it is not re- 
peated from day to day. It occurs only 
once. Were it to occur daily, for thirty 
or forty years, until our minds became 
thoroughly familiar with it, and we expect- 
ed it as something of course, as doubtless 
the Israelites of the second generation did 
in regard to the manna in the wilderness, 
the occurrence would cease to be a miracle 
to us. It is altogether probable that the 
children who were born in the wilderness, 



96 THE MIRACLE OF FOOD. 

and who from earliest childhood had been 
accustomed to see every morning the de- 
posit of manna all over the surface of the 
ground, just as regularly as they saw the 
return of the morning light, had no more 
feeling of there being something miraculous . 
in the occurrence, than we now have, when 
we see the blades of grass come forth every 
spring, or the golden fruit hanging from the 
branches every autumn. 

When our Lord turned water into wine, 
he did nothing more mysterious, nothing 
greater or more divine, than when he 
now, before our eyes, turns common water 
into the sweet sap of the maple and of the 
sugar-cane, or into the delicious juice of the 
orange and the pomegranate, or when he 
changes the common materials of earth and 
water into the luscious pulp of the apple 
and the peach, or the nourishing farina of 
the potato, the maize, and the wheat. If 
we plant together a 'grain of sand and a 
grain of corn, it is no art or skill or power 
of ours, that makes the one to remain un- 
changed in the soil, the other to break forth 
into roots and stalks and "bring forth 
fruit after his kind." It is only the direct 



THE MIRACLE OF FOOD. 97 

power of God himself, that thus works. 
The power that changes a single grain of 
corn or wheat into a thousand grains is the 
same that changed the w seven loaves" into 
bread enough to feed four thousand men, 
besides the women and children, and be- 
sides the seven baskets-full of fragments 
that were left. When this exercise of power 
occurs in a way that is not repeated, we call 
it a miracle. But when it is repeated daily, 
hourly, all the time, all around us, we call 
it Providence, or nature, or the laws of 
matter. But in truth, in the one case as in 
the other, it is God our Father, working as 
he wills, for the good of his children. 

The food which daily supplies the hunger 
of the twelve hundred millions of men who 
now people the earth is as directly the gift 
of our heavenly Father, as was the manna 
which during forty years was daily sent to 
those millions of Israel in the wilderness, 
or as was the miraculous supply of myste- 
riously multiplying loaves which came from 
the hands of our Saviour beside the Lake of 
Galilee. The transformation of the seven 
loaves must have been so rapid, that possibly 
those who stood by actually saw the succes- 



98 THE MIRACLE OF FOOD. 

sive steps in the change ; and possibly 
could we sit, microscope in hand, hour by 
hour, during the long months of vegetable 
transformation and growth, we, too, might 
see the actual steps by which a grain be- 
comes a thousand grains. But seeing or 
not seeing the steps in the change makes 
no difference in the stupendous fact. It is 
in either case a miracle. The supply of food 
for man and beast, generation after gen- 
eration, is a stupendous, continual miracle. 
The very commonness of it, if rightly con- 
sidered, ought only to fill us with the greater 
amazement. 

The English word Lord, if traced back 
to its old English form lavord, and thence 
still further back to the Anglo-Saxon laf-ord 
(loaf-source) , reveals to us its original mean- 
ing as the loaf-giver. And well may we, in 
this sense, call God our Lord. The loaf 
on my table tells me as distinctly of him, 
as did the loaves multiplying visibly in the 
hands of Jesus tell those rude mountaineers 
of Galilee that they were standing in the 
presence of a most gracious and powerful 
benefactor. 

But man lives not by bread alone, but by 



THE MIRACLE OF FOOD. 99 

every word which proceedeth out of the 
mouth of God. While I thank him for the 
perpetual miracle of food, by which my 
bodily wants and those of the unnumbered 
millions of the earth are supplied, I will not 
forget the gracious care with which he in 
like manner provides for my spiritual wants. 
When we undertake to minister to the 
spiritual needs of others > let us not forget 
the example of our Master. The man who 
is suffering from cold and hunger, who is in 
bodily want or pain, is not in a condition 
favorable for hearing about his soul and his 
sins. Jesus preceded his proclamations of 
mercy by deeds of mercy. Let us w go and 
do likewise," — nurse the sick, help the 
needy, put bread into the mouths of the 
hungry, clothes on the backs, and wood 
on the hearths, of the destitute, — and then 
may we speak to them of the love of Jesus 
with some hope of reaching their hearts. 




XVII. 



THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES. 



(Matthew xvi. 1-12.) 

/^VUR Saviour made it a subject of accusa- 
^^ tion against the men of his generation, 
that they did not observe the signs of the 
times. They professed to know what the 
weather would be, the most uncertain of all 
natural events ; and yet their eyes were 
closed to those wonderful indications of 
providence by which God was clearly point- 
ing out to the nations the advent of his Son. 
There are among us not a few who think 
that they see, in the affairs of the world at 
this time, signs of the second coming of 
the Son of man. I do not refer to those 
who go into minute questions of arithmetic, 
and undertake to predict the year and the 
day of his coming, but to that large and 
growing company of sober-minded, devout 



THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES. IOT 

Christians, who believe that the Lord has 
left to his people a perpetual command to 
watch for his coming, and who think that 
the events of the present day indicate that 
he is near at hand, — that he may come per- 
haps during this present generation. 

A plain unlettered reader — and the gos- 
pel is meant for such — can hardly read the 
New Testament attentively, without get- 
ting the impression that Christians are en- 
joined to live in a state of perpetual looking 
for some glorious manifestation of the Son 
of man. It is to this fact, doubtless, that 
in every age of the church this feeling of 
expectation has showed itself. Nor does 
such a feeling in the minds of God's peo- 
ple indicate any uncertainty in his gracious 
purposes. He may have fixed a certain 
year and day on which our Lord Jesus shall 
again appear on the earth, and yet have 
purposely left the signs of the event in that 
obscure condition that no man can know 
certainly when it will be, and yet all men 
should live in a sober expectation of its ap- 
proach. The state of mind of one who be- 
lives that his Lord may at any time return 
to the world is not one to unfit a man for 



102 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES. 

present duty. If indeed it were definitely 
revealed that Christ would reappear on 
the earth on the first of July, 1870, the 
announcement might doubtless tend to 
derange the affairs of the world. But that 
general state of patient expectation, which 
is taught and cultivated by most of our 
Second-Adventists, is not of a kind to in- 
terfere with the regular course of worldly 
affairs, while it is eminently adapted to 
allay the perturbations of the mind, and to 
check the undue desires for worldly gain or 
pleasure. The event will indeed come but 
once, and in its own due time ; but the ex- 
pectation of it, the looking for it, is a per- 
petual ordinance for every generation, the 
duty of all time. It is one means by which 
the Lord keeps his church in its proper atti- 
tude, — with its face turned upward. 

Besides this general duty of the church, 
there are duties to particular individuals, 
growing out of special indications of divine 
providence towards them. God gives us 
intimations of his will, not only in his 
word, but by what happens to us in our 
private affairs. It is the duty, therefore, of 
every Christian to look for the signs of his 



THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES. IO3 

own times, as much as it is the duty of the 
farmer or the mariner to watch the appear- 
ance of the sky. 

A dear child is taken away, a friend is 
snatched from us, our plans of business meet 
some sudden overthrow, our health is im- 
paired, and we are laid aside as useless, or 
we meet some loss of hearing, or of sight. 
Such things are no sign by which others 
may judge us. But they may well be signs 
to ourselves. They may be the methods 
by which God is speaking to us. No event 
can happen to us, out of the ordinary cur- 
rent of affairs, but we should hear the voice 
of God in it. It is to us a sign from him, 
and we should try to find its meaning. 

In that special field of labor, which it has 
been my privilege specially to cultivate, 
there have of late been signs, that God is 
preparing and executing some great and 
glorious work through this instrumentality. 
The Sunday-school teacher who stands in 
1870 where he did in i860, must have had 
his eyes and ears strangely closed to what 
was going on around him. When the world 
is moving forward, for one to stand still is 
in truth to go backward. The march of 



104 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES. 

events is plainly calling on every teacher 
to examine his methods, and to see whether 
he is doing all that the present helps have 
put in his power. Mighty agencies for 
good have been called into existence, which 
were not known a generation ago. There 
are manifold signs of a coming harvest. 

The laborer who does not heed them, and 
who does not prepare himself accordingly 
to put in his sickle, will share but lightly in 
that great harvest-home, where each guest 
shall come bringing his sheaves with him. 




XVIII. 

CONFESSION. 

(Matthew xvi. 13-20.) 

T3ROTEST ANTS have been so busy 
-*- fighting the corruptions of the confes- 
sional, that they have well-nigh forgotten 
that true Christian confession which every 
disciple is called upon to make. Let us en- 
deavor to recall both the word and the thing 
to its right place in our thoughts. 

Confession, in its primary and widest 
meaning, is simply an acknowledgment of 
what is true in regard to ourselves, whether 
it respects our conduct or our belief, and 
whether the thing confessed is good or bad. 
In latter times, the word has drifted off al- 
most entirely to the one side of its general 
meaning, and is limited not merely to what 
we have done, but more specifically still to 
what we have done that is bad. Confession, 



106 CONFESSION. 

in ordinary parlance, means an acknowl- 
edgment of guilt ; in a religious sense, it 
means telling our sins to God, or to a priest. 
But there is a wider and more precious use 
of this word, which we ought not to lose 
sight of, and for which we have not only 
etymological, but scriptural authority. Our 
Lord says, "Whosoever, therefore, shall 
confess me before men, him will I confess 
also before my Father which is in heaven " 
(Matt. x. 32). And Paul says, " With the 
mouth confession is made unto salvation " 
(Rom. x. 10). In this sense the early Chris- 
tians used the word ; namely, to express pub- 
licly one's belief in Christianity. So Bacon 
speaks of "our religion, which hath been 
sealed with the blood of so many martyrs 
and confessors" In this sense Peter con- 
fessed ', when, throwing apparently his 
whole soul into the words, he said to our 
Lord himself, " Thou art the Christ, the 
Son of the living God ! " 

What a noble confession was that ! No 
hesitation about it, no circumlocution, 
no perhaps, no "I think that it is so," or 
"I say that it is," but boldly, affirmatively, 
with the utmost directness, " Thou art!" 



CONFESSION. IO7 

Let us look for a moment at some of 
the particulars included in this confession. 

1. Peter declares Jesus to be Christ; that is, 
Messiah, of whom the Jewish nation were 
in expectation, that great, long-promised 
Deliverer for whom they were looking. 

2. He acknowledges Jesus, not as some de- 
liverer or holy one, but definitely the Christ, 
the very Saviour expected. 3. He declares 
Jesus to be Son of God, not as all are 
sons, for we are all in one sense " his off- 
spring,'' but (4) the Son, in the peculiar 
and personal sense which belongs to the 
* only begotten of the Father." 5. He de- 
clares this God, whose Son Jesus is, to be 
the * living" God, the eternal, self-existent 
Jehovah. Was ever a confession of faith 
more precise, or more emphatic? "Thou 
art the Christ, the Son of the living God ! " 
Not a word to spare, not a word which does 
not ring with the very essence of gospel 
truth ! 

Doubtless we should confess our sins to 
God. We are all sinners, and we should 
make humble confession thereof. So did Pe- 
ter after his inglorious denial of the Lord. 
But that confession of sin is a suspicious 



IOS CONFESSION. 

article which does not lead to the correla- 
tive duty of confessing Christ. " I have 
sinned," refers to self: "I do believe," re- 
fers to Christ ; and self-abasing is with- 
out meaning or end, when stripped of its 
complementary duty of Christ-honoring. 

Confessing Christ is something more than 
believing in him, something more than 
merely thinking that he is the Saviour. 
It is expressing our belief. It is saying, 
openly, publicly, by words and by signifi- 
cant acts, that we believe in him. Secret 
discipleship has no sanction in the economy 
of the gospel. Every man to whom the 
gospel comes is bound, not only to believe 
it, but to profess his belief. This is a duty 
which we owe as well to our fellow-men as 
to Christ. It is one great means by which 
Christianity is propagated in the world. 
No man ever makes a public profession of 
discipleship without thereby preaching the 
gospel. The very act of thus "standing up 
for Jesus" speaks trumpet-tongued to the 
man's unconverted friends and companions. 
Our Saviour knew well what was in man, 
and the influences by which men are moved, 
when he thus enjoined upon his followers 



CONFESSION. IO9 

the duty of confessing his name. We are 
not all called upon to argue in defence of 
Christianity. Many of us are not able to 
do so. But we are required to bear our tes- 
timony, to be witnesses for the gospel, to 
say," I do believe." When men thus unite 
to express their belief in any doctrine, or 
their allegiance to any person, the act is 
itself a power in human affairs. Never is 
the conscience of an unconverted man so 
effectually pricked, as when some friend or 
neighbor, with whom he has frequent inter- 
course, openly confesses Christ. 

There is a significant and beautiful coun- 
terpart to our confession of Christ. When 
Peter said to Jesus, "Thou art the Christ," 
the Lord replied, "/ also say to thee." As 
Peter acknowledged Jesus to be his Lord 
and Master, so Jesus acknowledged Peter to 
be his disciple. It was a double confession, 
— of Lordship on the one side, and of disci- 
pleship on the other. This seems to be the 
natural interpretation of our Lord's reply to 
his disciple. "You acknowledge me to be 
what I claim to be, — the Messiah, the Son of 
God, the Saviour of the world ; I also ac- 
knowledge you, and all who thus believe 



IIO CONFESSION. 

and profess, to be my disciples, my friends, 
the representatives of my religion." And 
elsewhere, in the passage already quoted, 
Jesus expressly says, that in the world to 
come he will confess before his Father, that 
is, will publicly acknowledge and recognize 
as his friends, those who in this world have 
confessed or acknowledged him. We con- 
fess Christ here, we are confessed by him 
hereafter. Glorious reward ! 

But let us not forget that there is a nega- 
tive side to the picture, — that they who are 
ashamed of Christ here, of them will he also 
be ashamed, w r hen he cometh in his king- 
dom ! 




XIX. 



FORETASTES. 



(Matthew xvii. 1-13.) 

r I ^HE followers of Christ have a mingled 
-*- lot. Joy and sorrow, sunshine and 
shadow, follow each other with almost the 
regularity of summer and winter, or of day 
and night. It was so with the twelve, who 
had the privilege of attending the personal 
ministry of the Lord himself. After every 
scene of hopefulness and comfort, there 
came generally a season of trial and humili- 
ation, after every night of sorrow some 
morning of gladness. When the miracles 
and teachings of Jesus, by their variety and 
their ever-increasing power, had reached 
such a culminating point, that the disciples 
awoke finally to the assured conviction that 
He in whose presence they stood was in 
very deed no other than the long-promised 



112 FORETASTES. 

Messiah, that he was no mere earthly deliv- 
erer, such as they had at first imagined, 
but a truly divine being, the only begotten 
Son of the Father, so that Peter, speaking 
for them all, broke out into that sublime 
confession, "Thou art the Christ, the Son 
of the living God," — it must have been to 
them a moment of high and holy rapture. 
They must have felt that now, at length, 
the highest expectations of their hearts were 
realized. This Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, 
whom they had followed in his humilia- 
tions, with hearts at times full of misgiv- 
ings, now stood before their minds clearly 
attested as indeed the Lord of life and 
glory. 

So high was the joy which found expres- 
sion in the confession of Peter, that the 
Master found it needful to moderate their 
exhilaration ; and he began forthwith to 
speak to them more plainly than ever before 
of his approaching sufferings and death. 
The effect of these plain declarations about 
his crucifixion was to fill their hearts again 
with sorrow and dread ; and after a week 
spent by them in gloom and depression, he 
once more, to those three of them at least 



FORETASTES. H3 

who were to be most severely tried by the 
coming catastrophe, made a revelation of his 
glory far surpassing any thing which they 
had yet seen. 

The event referred to is familiarly known 
as The Transfiguration. It is some- 
thing quite unique in the gospel history, 
and has in all ages made a strong impression 
upon the mind of the universal Church. To 
no human eye has a more glorious vision 
ever been accorded than that given on this 
occasion to "the three disciples. Peter, James, 
and John. Moses on Mount Sinai, and 
Ezekiel by the river Chebar, and John him- 
self at a later da}/ on the Isle of Patmos, 
may have had visions more terribly sublime. 
But the appearance of Jesus on the Mount 
of Transfiguration, more than any thing 
else recorded in the Bible, seems intended 
as a foretaste of that perfect bliss which 
awaits the believer when, in heaven itself, 
with open vision, he shall look into the face 
of his glorified Lord. His appearance w r as 
indeed unspeakably glorious, and yet the 
glory was not of that overpowering kind 
which would have terrified the disciples, 
and taken from them all sense of enjoyment. 



ii4 



FORETASTES. 



The light which shone all around him, and 
which also shone out from him, and even 
from his garments, that they became white 
and glistering, so as no fuller on earth could 
whiten them, was yet so softened to the eyes 
of the disciples that their love was awakened 
even more than their wonder. He who, by 
a momentary dropping of the veil, thus 
stood before them in clear vision as very 
God, was still in the flesh as man, to their 
apprehension, — not beyond the reach of 
their human sympathies, not speaking to 
them in a voice of terror, but with infinite 
tenderness "coming" to each of them, and 
"touching" them. How assuring must 
have been this loving little act ! How sen- 
sibly it must have made them feel, that the 
wonderful Being, who was thus gloriously 
transfigured, was still their human friend Je- 
.§us, the man with whom they had walked 
up the mountain together. Surely, if ever 
human hearts on earth have had a fore- 
taste of that which makes the crowning 
bliss of heaven, it must have been "Peter, 
James, and John," on the Mount of Trans- 
figuration. No wonder that, in the fulness 
of their joy, they wished to build taberna- 



FORETASTES. 115 

cles there for Jesus and his heavenly guests, 
and to abide there evermore ! 

There are moments, in the lives of most 
believers, when they have precious views 
of Jesus, when they are up with him in the 
mount, and with strong faith they see him 
almost as with open vision, and they would 
fain abide evermore in that ecstatic and bliss- 
ful condition. But such is not meant to be 
our normal condition here, any more than it 
was that of the twelve. The Master gives 
us occasionally a foretaste of the happiness 
to come, that we may not be discouraged on 
our way, and to allure us forward in our 
course ; but we may not expect to be ever 
in this exalted state of enjoyment. We 
have no right to look for the feast here, but 
only an occasional foretaste, just enough to 
keep our appetites keen for that fulness of joy 
which shall be hereafter. 



XX. 



LOSS AND GAIN. 



(Matthew xvi. 24-26.) 

'TPHE amount of values collected within a 
**- small compass in some of our commer- 
cial establishments borders on the fabulous. 
When stated in figures it fails to make any 
adequate impression. We speak, indeed, of 
millions ; and we know in general terms that 
it takes seven figures in combination to ex- 
press a million. But no one who has not 
undertaken to count a million, or gone 
through some ingenious process of working 
his mind up to the prodigious thought, has 
any real conception of what a million is. 
When, therefore, the operations of one of 
these "merchant princes" are spoken of as 
being counted by millions, or by tens of 
millions, the idea conveyed to most minds is, 
after all, extremely vague. The impression 



LOSS AND GAIN. II7 

is not much greater than when we speak of 
hundreds of thousands. Incidental circum- 
stances, or single items carried out in imagi- 
nation to their legitimate results, sometimes 
give a more vivid and realizing idea of the 
vastness of commercial values, than the most 
careful general statements. For example : 
The ultimate unit for measuring commercial 
value is an ordinary day's labor. Now the 
diamonds alone in the shop of a certain 
jeweller in Chestnut Street (I refer to 
Bailey's) would cost the daily toil of a 
common laboring man for at least three 
thousand years. The other miscellaneous 
goods in the same store would cost an equal 
amount. A man would have had to work, 
therefore, from the time of Adam down to 
the present day, to earn what is contained 
in that one store. 

Another illustration of quite a different 
character came to my knowledge a few days 
ago. The President of a small Insurance 
Company, in an inland town, was surprised 
one day by a call from the business agent of 
A. T. Stewart, the great dry-goods mer- 
chant of New York. The agent had come 
to effect an insurance, and wished to make 



Il8 LOSS AND GAIN. 

it for as large an amount as the means of the 
company would allow. The company had 
but a small capital, being intended for local 
business only, and were unwilling to take 
more than two risks of five thousand dollars 
each, one on the goods in Mr. Stewart's 
down-town store, and one on the goods in 
his up-town store. The President then asked 
the agent how he came to know any thing of 
their affairs, and why he had sought out that 
small company and that inland town, for 
effecting an insurance. The man replied, 
so large was the amount of goods in the 
store, that all the insurances they could 
effect, in every responsible company in the 
United States and Canada, including also 
the foreign companies doing business in the 
United States, and making the insurance in 
each as large as the capital of the company 
would seem to justify, did not yet cover 
the amount of property exposed ; and hence 
they were on the continual look-out for 
every new company capable of taking ad- 
ditional risks. 

Instances like the two which have been 
named give us some faint idea of the vast- 
ness of the values concentrated in our large 



LOSS AND GAIN. 119 

cities. Yet the wealth of these two mer- 
chants is but a drop in the bucket, com- 
pared with the aggregate wealth of the two 
cities in which they dwell, as the wealth of 
all the cities of the continent is but small 
compared with that of the country at large ; 
and what is the wealth of the whole United 
States compared with that of the whole 
world ? 

Does any Sabbath-school teacher ask, 
What has all this account of worldly treas- 
ure to do with my work ? I answer : The 
feeblest, the most lowly, the least attractive 
child in your class has in the eyes of the 
Saviour a value beyond that of all the jew- 
els, all the merchandise, all the wealth of 
every kind, not of Chestnut Street and 
Broadway merely, but of the whole world ! 
Nay : one human soul is in itself of more 
value than the entire material universe. Our 
Saviour has himself said so, and he has used 
this very illustration of worldly riches to 
prove the folly of those who neglect so great 
an interest as that of the eternal well-being 
of the soul ; and we may well adopt a line of 
argument for which we have so clear a war- 
rant in the example of our blessed Lord 



120 LOSS AND GAIN. 

himself. What would be thought of either 
of the eminent merchants named, were he to 
treat the vast interest that is under his keep- 
ing with the quiet indifference and uncon- 
cern which mark our treatment of the eternal 
interests of those committed to us? Where 
is the teacher, where is the parent, where is 
the pastor, who bestows upon the members 
of his charge a tithe of the solicitude, the 
sagacity, the tact, the invention, the toil, 
given by these men in amassing and secur- 
ing their precious millions? 

The difficulty with us all is the same as 
that for which we are so ready to blame the 
disciples. We do not really believe what 
the Saviour says on the sabject. We put a 
different estimate upon things from that 
which God puts upon them. ' "Thou savor- 
est not the things that be of God, but the 
things that be of men." More literally and 
exactly, "Thou art not minded like God, 
but like men ; thou valuest things, not as he 
does, but as they do." 

The disciples still had worldly views. 
They were still looking for an earthly king- 
dom, and were slow of heart to believe in 
that spiritual gain, in comparison of which 



LOSS AND GAIN. 121 

all earthly gain is but loss. The man who 
values the soul as Christ did will not hesi- 
tate about labors or sacrifices in order to 
save it. To make so great a gain, we will 
rise early and sit up late, and eat the bread 
of carefulness all our lives ; nay, rather than 
miss so great a prize, we will risk life itself, 
as worldly men continually do in the pursuit 
of worldly ends. 

If a right estimate of the value of the soul 
should lead us to make labors and sacrifices 
for the salvation of others, how much more 
for our own salvation ? This was the direct 
application of the subject made by the Sa- 
viour. What shall a man be profited, if he 
shall gain the whole world, and lose his 
soul? or what shall a man give in exchange 
for his soul? or, rather, as it is in the origi- 
nal, " as an exchange for his soul." The idea 
is, that the worldling sells his soul, for gain 
or pleasure of some kind, and then, repent- 
ing of his bargain, tries to buy his soul back. 
But the bargain has been struck with one 
who will not yield up the possession. There 
is no price by which we can regain that 
jew r el when once lost. The loss is final, 
irretrievable. 



122 LOSS AND GAIN. 

Should we not press this argument upon 
the minds of our scholars? If we really 
believe the doctrine on which it is founded, 
can we help being in earnest in our efforts 
for their salvation ? 




XXI. 



THE TEMPLE -TAX 



(Matthew xvii. 24-27.) 

TN the Mosaic economy, distinct provision 
was made for the pecuniary expenses 
connected with the temple service. These 
expenses were large and constant, and the 
means of meeting them was not left to chance 
or caprice. The same code which pre- 
scribed the costly ritual prescribed also the 
mode in which the revenue necessary for its 
maintenance should be raised. In the thir- 
teenth chapter of Exodus we find it enjoined, 
as a perpetual ordinance upon all Israelites, 
that every male among them, from the age 
of twenty upward, should pay yearly a poll- 
tax of half a shekel. This requirement 
seems to have been enforced with tolerable 
regularity through all the changes of govern 
ment to which they had been subjected ; and 



124 THE TEMPLE-TAX. 

it is mentioned in the gospels as something 
customary, with which everybody was fa- 
miliar, and which therefore required no 
explanation. 

To enable us, however, the better to under- 
stand the gospel narrative, it is necessary to 
remark that, instead of paying this tax in 
the old Hebrew coins, the shekels and half- 
shekels, payment was made in those com- 
mon coins of the period, which were the 
nearest commercial equivalents of the old 
coinage, very much as now in Canada all 
debts, even those to the government, are 
paid in American dollars, halves, quarters, 
and dimes, although accounts are kept in 
pounds, shillings, pence, and farthings. The 
nearest approach to the skekel and the frac- 
tions of a shekel was found in two Greek 
coins then in current use in Judea, the 
drachma and the stater, four drachmas be- 
ing equal to one stater. The denominations 
were the drachma, didrachma (or double- 
drachma), and stater (sometimes also called 
tetradrachma, or fourfo /^-drachma. As 
the stater was the equivalent of the shekel, 
the didrachma was of course the equivalent 
of the half-shekel; and the half-shekel, it 



THE TEMPLE-TAX. 1 25 

will be remembered, was the specific poll-tax 
enjoined upon all adult males for the support 
of the temple service. With this explana- 
tion, let us open to the narrative contained 
in the seventeenth chapter of Matthew. 

They that receive the tribute money (liter- 
ally "The receivers of the didrachma," that 
is, the collectors of the half-shekel temple- 
money) came to Peter and said, "Doth not 
your master pay [literally] the didrachma?" 
These collectors of the temple-money were 
men in humble position, and the question 
was made apparently in good faith. They 
had heard vague rumors of Christ's preten- 
sions ; and they did not know whether, on 
account of his spiritual character, he claimed 
exemption from this tax or not. Peter, with 
characteristic forwardness, answered at once, 
without stopping to inquire of the Master 
himself. We can almost hear him saying, 
" Certainly. How silly the question ! Do not 
all Jews, who pretend to keep the law at 
all, pay the didrachma?" 

Having given this off-hand answer, he 
went into the house, and, meeting Jesus, 
was apparently about to tell what had 
taken place, when Jesus anticipated him, 



126 THE TEMPLE-TAX. 

saying, "What thinkest thou, Simon? of 
whom do earthly kings take taxes or tribute? 
of their sons, or of strangers? If I am the 
son and heir of the Great King in whose 
honor the temple-service is maintained, 
why should I pay the service-money? The 
law is really not binding on me. But let us 
not be a means of stumbling to those humble 
officers of the law. Go thou to the sea, and 
cast a hook, and take the fish that first Com- 
eth up ; and when thou hast opened his 
mouth, thou shalt find a stater [equivalent 
to tzvo didrachmas or half-shekels] : that 
take, and give for us both, — for me and 
thee." 

Peter here, as in so many other places, had 
been precipitate in expressing his opinion. 
Yet how gently and kindly was the correc- 
tion given ! How very different from that 
recorded in the previous chapter, when Jesus 
said, "Get thee behind me, Satan !" What- 
ever may have been the cause of the awful 
severity on that occasion, whether personal 
and selfish ambition mingled with Peters of- 
ficious zeal, or whatever it may have been, 
there was evidently no motive of the sort in 
the present case. It was merely Peter's natu- 



THE TEMPLE-TAX. 1 27 

ral forwardness, speaking out unadvisedly. 
Let us learn not to be harsh in condemning 
the mistakes of those who err from mere in- 
consideration, where the mistake has evi- 
dently sprung from an honest desire to do 
right, and where it is accompanied with no 
selfish personal ends. 

How tender was cur Lord of the con- 
sciences of these humble public servants, 
complying promptly with their official de- 
mand, so that they need not feel as if this 
new religious teacher was one who sought to 
evade his legal obligations ! Yet he acquired 
the means of payment by working a miracle, 
thereby stopping the mouths of any who 
might argue, from his paying the didrachma, 
that he was not all that he had claimed to be, 
Son of God, and Lord of the Temple. How 
different this from the unhesitating and open 
denunciations which on all occasions he ut- 
tered against the lordly and supercilious 
Pharisees and Sadducees ! If conscience ob- 
liges us at any time to use the language of 
severity, in vindication of the truth and the 
right, let us at least spare those who are 
the mere ministers, not the authors, of the 
wrong. 



128 THE TEMPLE-TAX. 

The deed of Jesus was equally miraculous, 
whether, as some suppose, he actually cre- 
ated on the moment the coin which Peter 
was to find in the fish, or whether, as in the 
general opinion, Jesus by his omniscience 
saw in all the lake one particular fish which 
had swallowed a coin, and knew that this 
particular fish would first come to Peter's 
hook. Surely, one who can thus anticipate 
all the difficulties of his children, who can 
with equal ease provide for every emer- 
gency, whether theirs or his, who in provid- 
ing for his own didrachma did not forget 
that needed also by his perplexed disciple, 
— surely, such a Saviour is entitled to the 
unreserved confidence of his followers. Let 
us learn to trust Him in all things, at all 
times, doing and receiving to-day what to- 
day he gives us to do or to receive, and 
thankful for the hand which keeps to-mor- 
row's page safely folded down. 



r 



XXII. 

PRIMACY. 

(Mark ix. 33-37) 

TVTOT long since, while travelling in the 
^ cars, I chanced to overhear a conver- 
sation between two Sunday-school men. 
They were members of one of the large, in- 
fluential churches in the city of Philadel- 
phia, and they were discussing the affairs 
of the Sunday school connected with their 
church. One of them was a teacher in the 
school ; the other had been the librarian, 
and had tried to be the superintendent, but 
did not succeed in getting votes enough at 
the annual election, and, like other sore- 
headed candidates, he now stood aloof from 
the concern altogether. The other gentle- 
man was in evident sympathy with the dis- 
appointed aspirant, and the whole burden 
of their conversation was the incompetency 

9 



I30 PRIMACY. 

of the present superintendent, and the ra- 
pidity with which the school was running 
into the ground. The ex-librarian, with 
great gusto, entered into the minutiae of the 
election, and of the manoeuvres to get this 
vote and that vote, and what he would do, 
were he at the head of the school ! 

Not one word escaped the lips of either 
of them in regard to the spiritual interests of 
the school. There was no inquiry about 
little Johnny Dillon, who a few months be- 
fore had been anxious about his soul, and 
was thought by some to be converted ; no 
question about poor Susie Young, the 
brightest little girl, perhaps, in all the 
school, who had always attracted the notice 
of visitors by her sweet and winning ways, 
and who was now laid aside upon her couch 
by an incurable disease ; nothing about 
Moses Brown, one of this gentleman's own 
scholars, who had been tempted to steal, 
and was now in the hands of the police ; 
nothing about that young lady teacher, a 
recent convert, who had entered upon the 
work with so much ardor, and who had al- 
ready brought three lambs, hopefully con- 
verted, into the fold of Christ; nothing 



PRIMACY. 131 

about the patient labors of that poor, de- 
formed woman, bent almost double by bod- 
ily infirmity, who could not teach a class, 
but who, humbly willing to do what she 
could, obtained every Sunday from the su- 
perintendent a list of his absentees among 
the poorer classes, and during the week 
with loving diligence hunted them up and 
brought them back to the fold ; not a word 
about the new blackboard, and the new 
map of Palestine, which had been placed 
in the school-room a few weeks before. 

The whole conversation of these two 
Christian gentlemen turned upon the bald 
question of the primacy, — who should be 
first? The ex-librarian's head was sore. 
He had a bitter grievance : he had not 
been elected superintendent, as he thought 
he ought to have been. The position was 
due to him. He had been a long time in 
the school ; he had paid freely towards its 
expenses ; he had a middle-aisle pew ; he 
was a prominent man in the congregation. 
In his own estimation, he was evidently 
ornamental. His just claims have been over- 
looked. How nicely he would have regula- 
lated the singing, and kept the chorister in 



132 PRIMACY. 

due bonds ! How he would have made such 
and such a meddlesome teacher know his 
place ! How many wise regulations he 
would have adopted ! The whole question 
of the superintendency, in this man's mind, 
was simply an affair of supremacy, place, 
and power. . 

Never have I heard a more impressive 
commentary on our Saviour's words : rr If 
any man desire to be first, the same shall 
be last of all, and the servant of all." On 
nothing does our Lord dwell with more em- 
phasis, from the beginning to the end of his 
discourses, than on lowliness of mind. 
There is no sharper contrast between his 
kingdom and the kingdoms of this world, 
between his system and those of the heathen 
philosophers, than in the place assigned to 
humility. If this lowliness of mind is 
needed in any part of the operations of the 
church, it is especially important in the 
work of the Sabbath school, and most of all 
in him who is to superintend the school. 
The man who as fires to his office, who 
feels as though he had a claim to it, lacks 
the first qualification for it. Or rather, he 
has a positive ^-qualification. 



PRIMACY. 133 

I never knew a superintendent yet, 
that was good for any thing, who did not 
prefer being simply a teacher and having 
a class of his own. I do not mean to say 
that a good superintendent should be en- 
tirely blind to the fact that he has certain 
qualifications. But he has also a more 
vivid apprehension than others have, of the 
many self-denying, laborious, unattractive 
duties of the position ; his thoughts run, 
not so much upon the primacy, as upon the 
cup of cold water, — the thousand nameless, 
unheralded acts of relief and ministrations 
of mercy and duty, which makes the office 
important. 

To be a good superintendent is most truly 
"to be the servant of all," both scholars 
and teachers. The candidate for the office 
of Bishop in the Episcopal Church is taught 
to say, Nolo Efiscofari, — "I do not wish 
to be Bishop." The fact that this formula 
may sometimes be uttered insincerely does 
not lessen the value or the significance of 
the lesson which it is intended to convey. 
A childlike feeling of un worthiness, a nat- 
ural shrinking from official responsibility, 



134 PRIMACY. 

and the absence of the love of authority and 
rule, are prominent among the qualifications 
for office-bearing in any department of 
Christ's kingdom. 




XXIII. 



FORBEARANCE. 



(Matthew viii. 21-35) 

TN the past times of domestic slavery, it 
was a common remark, that no overseers 
were so severe as those taken from the 
negroes themselves. It was proverbially a 
hard lot for the slave when a fellow-slave 
was placed over him as taskmaster. The 
case was not peculiar to that race, or to that 
condition of life. Some mean principle of 
human nature seems to lie at the foundation 
of it. Five centuries ago old Chaucer gave 
us, in his Canterbury pilgrims, a series of 
pictures of life as it then was in "merry 
England." The portraits which he has 
given in the prologue to the Canterbury 
Tales are universally admitted to be master- 
pieces of painting from life. They are in 



13^ FORBEARANCE. 

fact England's best national Portrait Gal- 
lery. Among these lifelike pictures is that 
of the Reve, whose office it was to collect 
the rents and other dues from the poor ten- 
ants and laborers of a great landed proprie- 
tor. This particular Reve, whom Chaucer 
describes, had originally been himself a 
common laborer, and had worked his way 
up to the position of authority and control 
over others. Chaucer does not speculate or 
philosophize about his character, but with 
that keen observation of facts which marks 
all his delineations, he describes the Reve 
as one who was incapable of relenting, 
and from w r hose lynx eyes there was no es- 
cape. The poor laborers and tenants held 
him in mortal terror. "They dreaded him 
as if he had been death." The old saying- 
is, "Set a rogue to catch a rogue." No de- 
tectives are equal to those who have them- 
selves been criminals; and this, not merely 
because they know more about the ways of 
sin, but they seem to take a special delight 
in ferreting out the sinner. The man who 
has been a transgressor, and who needs 
forbearance, seems by some strange freak 
of human nature the very one who is least 



FORBEARANCE. I 37 

disposed to exercise forbearance towards 
others. 

Chaucer's picture of the old Reve, as well 
as the traditional character of the negro 
overseer, may teach us all a lesson. We all 
are such by nature and position that we 
need forbearance for our own shortcomings, 
and yet we all have a natural tendency to 
withhold forbearance from others. Every 
man has a double relation. He is a debtor 
and a creditor. He owes ten thousand times 
more than he can ever pay, and at the same 
time he has those all about him and under 
him who owe him something. One would 
suppose, a firiori, that a man's own bank- 
ruptcy would make him lenient towards 
other debtors. Yet, as a historical fact, 
just the opposite takes place, the w r orld over ; 
and our Lord did but paint from nature, 
when he drew the picture of the servant 
who had been freely forgiven a debt of ten 
thousand talents (more than thirteen mill- 
ions of dollars), and then turned about 
harshly and inexorably upon a poor fellow- 
servant who owed him an hundred pence. 

We are very apt, in reading such a 
parable, to think that it cannot possibly 



I38 FORBEARANCE. 



apply to its. It may fit some of my neigh- 
bors, but not me. We say, with one of old, 
M What ! is thy servant a dog, that he should 
do this great thing? " Yet there are very 
few of us who do not need to be admon- 
ished of the duty of charity in our opinions, 
and forbearance in our actions, towards 
others, our fellow-servants. 

This spirit of intolerance, which our Lord 
rebuked with such startling emphasis, 
seems to be a sin of which the professing 
people of God are in especial danger. It 
was the great sin of the Pharisees, the 
straitest sect of religious people then living ; 
it has been the sin of men zealous for the 
truth in all ages of the church. It was the 
sin of some of the early Reformers, and of 
the English and the New England Puritans. 
Men who are habitually careful, scrupulous, 
and exacting in regard to their own conduct, 
are under a constant temptation to be intol- 
erant towards others ; and what we need in 
such cases, to cure us of this tendency, is 
to be habitually reminded of our own vast 
unpaid debt, — the ten thousand forgiven 
talents. This need not blind us to the faults 
of others ; it need not prevent our seeing 



FORBEARANCE. 139 

what they owe to us and to him ; but it should 
make us tolerant. If God bears with us 
we ought to bear with our fellows. The 
argument is plain and simple. The case 
by which it is illustrated is so striking that 
we all involuntarily exclaim, "Out upon the 
servant who could behave so ! " 

Yet we see instances of the same intoler- 
ant spirit all around us every day. If not 
blinded by self-love, we find ourselves giv- 
ing way to the same sin in some of its pro- 
tean shapes. There is not a church, not a 
school, not a family, not a social circle, in 
which some forgiven sinner is not to be 
seen seizing by the throat some fellow-sin- 
ner, and saying in effect, w Pay what thou 
owest ! " If you do not owe me money, you 
owe me respect, deference, social recogni- 
tion, admiration, gratitude, love, something ', 
which you do not render. You rush by me 
in church without speaking to me ; you did 
not invite me to your party last week ; you 
have forgotten the kind turn I did you last 
summer, when you wanted help so badly ; 
you did not complete that piece of work 
according to your engagement ; you never 
give me civil words when I speak to you ; 



I40 FORBEARANCE. 

you are very careless about returning the 
books which you borrow of me, and still 
more careless in the use of them, bringing 
them back soiled and torn. 

But the enumeration w r ould be endless. 
We all have our grievances. The people 
with whom we have dealings, in almost 
every relation of life, are withholding from 
us in one shape or another, something that 
is justly our due. It is for the well-being of 
society, that these dues should ordinarily 
be enforced. Our Lord is not to be under- 
stood as relaxing the bonds of society. 
What he forbids is that harsh, exacting, in- 
exorable spirit, which . forgets-- its own infi- 
nite debt, while demanding from a fellow- 
debtor the utmost farthing of its rights ; 
which, forgetting its own sins before God. 
pronounces a condemning sentence on every 
omission or transgression of others. 




XXIV. 

THE TWELVE AND THE SEVENTY. 

(Luke x. 1-12.) 

COME obscurity hangs over the character 
^ and mission of the Seventy whom Jesus 
sent out, two and two, through the towns 
and villages. They were evidently inferior 
in rank and importance to the twelve. 
Their mission, too, instead of being an ex- 
clusive ministry for life, was special and 
temporary. They were sent out to do a 
special, preparatory, and subsidiary work, 
in advance of the chief workers, Jesus and the 
twelve apostles. And yet these Seventy 
were "laborers" in the harvest field, such as 
the church in all ages of its history is en- 
joined to pray for. 

It is no stretch of the fancy which finds 
in the present field of Christian labor two 
classes of laborers, holding relations to each 



I42 THE TWELVE AND THE SEVENTY. 

other and to the Master analogous to those 
of the Twelve and the Seventy. The minis- 
ter of the gospel of the present day is not 
indeed an apostle, with plenary powers and 
commission, but, like the apostles, he is one 
set apart for life to the exclusive business of 
making Christ known to his fellow-men. In 
like manner, also, the Sunday-school worker 
does not claim to be an official successor of 
the Seventy; and yet, like them, he has a 
special work to do, preparatory and auxil- 
iary to that of the minister ; he is clearly 
one of those "laborers" whom the church 
must unceasingly ps;ay the Lord of the har- 
vest to send forth into his harvest. The 
same is true of all Christian laymen, who 
without forsaking their secular calling, yet 
accept some special ministration of duty in 
the great work of evangelizing the world. 
That work in its very nature is so multiform 
and so pervading, that it must always need 
its Seventy as well as its Twelve, its work- 
ers for set occasions and special labors, as 
well as its fully ordained ministers and 
preachers. 

Perhaps an example will illustrate this 
idea better than any general description 



THE TWELVE AND THE SEVENTY. 1 43 

would. The minister of a certain city con- 
gregation not many years ago called to- 
gether the male members of his church, 
and explained to them in some detail the 
spiritual wants of the population in the im- 
mediate neighborhood of the church. The 
Sabbath school had put out its feelers in 
every direction for several squares, and had 
its representatives in every court and alley 
for at least half a mile north, south, east, and 
west of the church. By consultation with 
the superintendent and the teachers, he had 
found ten small centres of influence within 
a radius of half a mile, — families of the 
poorer class, who would be willing to open 
their humble dwellings on the Sabbath even- 
ing for a religious meeting, and who would 
invite and welcome any of their neighbors 
of the same class with themselves who might 
be willing to attend such a service. The 
people who were to be reached by this 
agency were such as would not come to 
the church because they were not dressed 
well enough, but they were quite willing to 
go to a neighbor's house and join in a re- 
ligious service with those of their own class. 
Fully one-half the population in our large 



144 THE TWELVE AND THE SEVENTY. 

cities is in this condition. They will not go 
to K church" to hear the gospel. The gos- 
pel therefore must be taken to them. There 
must be some agency which can carry it to 
their very doors, and that agency is the lay- 
men of the church. 

The minister, having made known his 
case, and shown how utterly impossible it 
was for him, single-handed, to cope with an 
evil so gigantic, called for help, and thirty 
of the gentlemen gave him their names as 
"laborers." He arranged them accordingly 
into bands of three, each three having charge 
of one of these centres. Their duties were 
very simple. The band assigned to a par- 
ticular station visited the locality during the 
week, and told the heads of families in the 
neighborhood that Mr. Blank would open 
his house on Sunday evening for a meeting, 
and they would be pleased to see him and 
his family present. From ten to fifteen 
were usually found in attendance as the re- 
sult of these invitations. The exercises of 
the meeting were simple and plain. The 
gentlemen did a little reading, a little sing- 
ing, a little praying, and a little exhorting. 
Going thus from week to week, they gradu- 



THE TWELVE AND THE SEVENTY. 1 45 

ally became acquainted with the people. 
They did not, indeed, like the Seventy, heal 
the sick by working miracles, but in many 
cases of sickness and destitution which came 
to their notice, they brought medicine, food, 
and clothing. Being business men, they 
had during the week many a friendly talk 
with these laborers in regard to their occu- 
pations, and advised them judiciously in 
regard to their worldly affairs. 

Thus, for one whole winter, work of this 
kind was carried on, noiselessly, but regu- 
larly, in ten different neighborhoods within 
a radius of half a mile from the church, and 
before the spring came, one and another of 
the families who had been drawn into these 
little prayer-meetings, were beginning to 
show various signs of improvement. They 
were beginning to have some ambition about 
the appearance, both of themselves and their 
children ; they were becoming more thrifty ; 
they began to attend the "church;" and, at 
the communion in June, about thirty were 
received into the membership of the church, 
as the first-fruits of these humble missions. 

If the Master, besides training and com- 
missioning his Twelve, found it wise to send 
10 



I46 THE TWELVE AND THE SEVENTY. 

out others also, two and two, on special 
errands, to places where he himself was 
about to go, and for the purpose of pre- 
paring the way for his own more public 
ministrations, surely his ministers ought to 
ponder the question, how far they may in 
like manner supplement their own labors by 
calling to their aid the labors of others. 
There is no problem before the ministry so 
momentous as this, How shall they most 
effectually utilize the lay power of the 
churches in the work of universal evan- 
gelization ? 




XXV. 

WHERE ARE THE NINE? 
(Luke xvii. 11-19.) 

EPROSY, especially in its more aggra- 
-L ' vated stages, is probably the most 
offensive form of disease that has afflicted 
the race. It seems to have been confined 
chiefly to Egypt, Arabia, and Syria. Its 
essential causes are even yet unknown, 
though modern science has succeeded to 
some extent in alleviating and partially 
curing it. Anciently it was deemed entirely 
incurable, and no attempt even was made 
towards curing it. All that ancient science 
and legislation attempted was to ascertain 
judicially who were infected by it, and then 
to exclude them absolutely, for the remain- 
der of their lives, from intercourse with 
their kind. The leper became both socially 



I48 WHERE ARE THE NINE? 

and legally a dead person. The ceremonial 
for the burial of the dead was pronounced 
over him. The marriage tie was dissolved. 
He was prohibited from entering a place 
of religious worship, or any place where 
food was prepared ; he might not dip his 
hands into running water, lest the stream 
should become polluted, nor take up any 
food or other necessary article without 
the aid of a stick or a fork ; and he was 
strictly enjoined to wear a peculiar kind of 
dress, by which he could be known at a 
distance, and even to give notice of his ap- 
proach by ringing a bell. The disease is of 
an eruptive character, though the eruption 
is dry, consisting of small white scales. 
It begins at the extremities, and gradually 
covers the whole person. The nails and 
teeth are often affected by it, becoming dis- 
colored and misshapen, and sometimes drop 
out altogether ; the breath becomes intoler- 
ably offensive ; the skin is affected ' by a 
burning, itching sensation, which admits of 
no alleviation. In some stages of the dis- 
ease, also, an unnatural and disgusting - 
voracity is produced. Perhaps the worst 
feature of the disease is that it is not fatal. 



WHERE ARE THE NINE? I49 

Persons afflicted with it live about as long 
as others do. But it is a living death. 

Some details of this loathsome and horri- 
ble disease are needed to enable us to ap- 
preciate the greatness of the boon conferred 
by our Saviour on the ten whom he healed, 
and also to understand the amazing insen- 
sibility of the nine, who, after their healing, 
quietly walked away without so much as 
even stopping to thank their benefactor. 
Of the many instances of cruel ingratitude 
which Jesus met, this was the one which 
more than any other seems to have touched 
his human heart. We all know more or 
less by experience the peculiar feeling of 
sadness produced, when one who has re- 
ceived from us some special kindness turns 
away from us with indifference and neglect, 
and we can therefore in some faint degree 
imagine with what a sorrowful voice and 
look the Saviour said to his followers, w Were 
there not ten cleansed? but where are the 

NINE ? " 

How could men, if there was any thing 
human about them, be insensible to such a 
deliverance ? Naaman the Syrian, in sim- 
ilar circumstances, could not find words 



150 WHERE ARE THE NINE? 

strong enough to express his thankfulness, 
and could hardly be restrained from pour- 
ing out his wealth like water ("ten talents 
of silver, six thousand pieces of gold, and 
ten changes of raiment") upon the prophet 
who had been the means of his cure. 

It seems incredible that any men could 
act as those nine did. Yet men are thus 
acting every day. Every one of us has thus 
acted time and again ; every one of us has 
by nature a disease which, in the Scriptures, 
is expressly called a leprosy, — a disease in- 
curable by all ordinary means, and render- 
ing us in the sight of God as vile as we are 
helpless. From this disease we have been 
cleansed, and that by a remedy as costly 
as it is efficacious. But how feeble are our 
expressions of thankfulness in comparison 
with the infinite greatness of our deliver- 
ance ! In a church numbering three hun- 
dred and seventeen communicants, many 
of them counting their wealth almost like 
that of the princely Syrian, certainly by 
hundreds of thousands, and nearly all of 
them persons well to do in the world, a col- 
lection was made last Sabbath for a cause 
dear to the heart of the Master, and the 



WHERE ARE THE NINE t 151 

whole amount received from this old and 
wealthy church was less than one hundred 
and sixty dollars ! Was there no heathen 
Naaman among them, who had to be re- 
strained from contributing his " ten. talents 
of silver " and his " six thousand pieces of 
gold?" Out of the same number of com- 
municants, about fifteen or twenty come 
together at the weekly prayer-meeting. 
May not the Saviour, on looking around at 
the empty and deserted benches, feel as 
keenly the neglect as when only one of the 
cleansed lepers turned back to give thanks? 
May he not now, as then, be conceived as 
uttering the sorrowful exclamation, — 
" Where are the nine ? " 

From every part of the country, from 
every part of the world, in every depart- 
ment of human labor, in town and country, 
in city and village, in missions foreign and 
domestic, in Sunday schools, in temperance 
efforts, in efforts to reclaim the ignorant, 
degraded, and vicious of every name, from 
every quarter, indeed, and at every turn, 
the cry is for help ! Humanity is bleeding 
at every pore, and in the name of Him who 
took upon him human nature that he 



152 WHERE ARE THE NINE? 

might call us brethren, the summons comes, 
trumpet-tongued, K Help ! Come to the res- 
cue of these sorrowing, dying millions ! 
c Whatsoever ye do for the least of these my 
brethren, ye do for me ! ' " What is the re- 
sponse to this call? Here and there, possi- 
bly, one may be found, nobly standing in 
the breach, — giving to the cause his " talents 
of silver," his "pieces of gold," perhaps 
himself, too, in grateful remembrance of the 
priceless cleansing which he has received : 
but where, where are the nine? 

Let us not be too hard upon the thankless 
lepers of Samaria and Galilee, when equal 
ingrates may be counted by the hundred on 
every side of us, — when perhaps we our- 
selves may be of the number ! 



XXVI. 

JOY. 

(Luke x. 17-24.) 

TT is a common mistake of worldly people, 
-** to think and speak of Christianity as 
something tending to gloom. Religion is 
supposed to compensate in the world to come 
for the misery which its followers incur here. 
From a misconception of those Scriptures 
which speak of Jesus as K a man of sorrows," 
he is often represented as one in whose bosom 
joy never reigned, over whose face a smile 
never passed. Some of the early pictures of 
him give him a face suited rather to the 
prophet Jeremiah, the prevailing expression 
being that of melancholy and gloom. In 
the famous apocryphal letter of Publius 
Lentulus to the Roman Senate, containing 
a description of the Saviour's personal ap- 
pearance, it is said, among other things, that 



154 J° Y - 

he " was never seen to smile, but often to 
weep." Undoubtedly our Lord's human life 
was one of suffering. He came to bear our 
sorrows. Yet this condition was entirely 
compatible with his possessing' an inward 
well-spring of joy, which communicated it- 
self, as joy always does, to the countenance. 
The crowds that thronged about him, and 
that hung upon his lips and his looks, as 
even children did, and as did the outcast, the 
social pariahs and "sinners" of every kind, 
must have found in his human appearance 
something attractive and gracious. It was 
not in miracles alone to draw the kind of 
multitudes that followed Jesus. Mere power 
does not attract. It ma}^ awaken awe ; it may 
produce a certain kind of fascination, — but 
it does not draw ; it does not win the confi- 
dence, or open the heart. The very char- 
acter, therefore, of the multitudes who hung 
about Jesus wherever he went, indicates that 
he was one who from his own experience 
could enter into the joys as well as the 
sorrows of others, and could rejoice with 
those that do rejoice, as well as w r eep with 
those that weep. Besides this, we are ex- 
pressly told, on more than one occasion, that 



Joy. iS5 

Jesus " rejoiced," and even spoke to his 
followers of the joy that filled his soul. 

Notwithstanding this, there has always 
been in the church a class of Christians who 
think of the Saviour's earthly life and char- 
acter as being exclusively one of gloom, and 
who aim in this respect to be as much like 
him as possible : who think, in other words, 
that in order to be religious they must be 
utterly miserable in spirit, and woe-begone 
in countenance. 

Surely such Christians forget that when 
the Seventy returned to Jesus with a report 
of what they had done, he not only did not 
restrain their joy on the occasion, but he 
himself "rejoiced in spirit." In Hebrews 
(xii. 2), we read of "the joy that was set 
before him." In the farewell discourse to the 
disciples, after the last supper, he repeatedly 
speaks to them of his joy, "that my joy 
might remain in you, and that your joy 
might be full ; " and in his prayer to the 
Father for them, he prays "that they might 
have my joy fulfilled in themselves," The 
Pharisees made it an objection to Jesus, 
that he did not lead an ascetic life, but min- 
gled with publicans and sinners : "Behold a 



i5 6 J° Y - 

man gluttonous, and a wine-bibber, a friend 
of publicans and sinners." The Scriptures 
are full of express commands to good people 
to rejoice and to be of a glad countenance, 
and it is mentioned as among the very highest 
attainments of the Christian, that his joy 
should be full ; that he should have a joy 
like and equal to that which Christ had. 
We are commanded to rejoice, just as we 
are commanded to pray, or to repent; "Re- 
joice evermore ; pray without ceasing." 
"Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord." 
"Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I 
say, rejoice." The very definition of the 
gospel is that of glad tidings, something 
suited to bring joy and gladness w r herever it 
is proclaimed. 

The causes of joy to the Christian are 
various. He is glad because of the exceed- 
ing great and precious promises that are set 
before him ; he is glad because his sins are 
pardoned, because God is his Father, because 
heaven is his home and final resting-place. 
But there is one source of joy to him that is 
worthy of special notice, because he has it in 
common with Christ. Our Lord, in speak- 
ing of it, calls it emphatically his joy, and 



JOY. 157 

prays that they may share in it, that they 
may have it to the full. What was this 
special joy which was set before the Saviour, 
and which sometimes so filled his heart that 
he spoke of it to his followers ? We see by 
the context, in each case, that it was con- 
nected with the conversion of sinners and the 
spread of the gospel ; it was the joy of the 
man having an hundred sheep, who having 
lost one of them, left all in search of it, and 
having found it, calleth together his friends 
and neighbors, and saith to them, " Re- 
joice with me, for I have found that which 
was lost ;" it was the joy of the woman hav- 
ing ten pieces of silver, who having lost one 
of them, swept her house and sought dili- 
gently till she found it, and then called to- 
gether her friends and neighbors, saying, 
"Rejoice with me, for I have found the 
piece which was lost ;" it was the joy of the 
father who welcomed home his returning 
prodigal with music and dancing, saying, 
"It was meet that we should make merry 
and be glad, for this thy brother was dead 
and is alive again, he was lost and is 
found." 

There is no higher or purer source of joy 



158 JOY. 

than that which arises from witnessing the 
conversion of sinners; and this joy is inten- 
sified when we ourselves have been instru- 
mental in their conversion. Christ, as the 
author and captain of salvation, has this joy 
to the utmost. Every converted sinner, from 
the repentant Adam and Eve to the latest 
converted man and woman in the yet unborn 
future, is an addition to the cup of joy that 
was set before him when he entered upon 
his glorious work. We are permitted to be 
sharers in this joy, not only as spectators 
of his glory, but as co-workers with him. 
Paul, addressing some who had been con- 
verted by his preaching, says, "Ye are my 
joy and crown of rejoicing." John says, 
"I have no greater joy than when my chil- 
dren [meaning his converts] walk in the 
truth." 

Joy is pure just in proportion to its unself- 
ishness. Who have such serene satisfaction 
as those who are always occupied with de- 
vices and labors to make others happy? 
How can one be grim-visaged and lugu- 
brious, who sees happiness springing up 
before him, wherever he bends his foot- 
steps ? If to confer happiness of any kind 



JOY. 159 

on others is a source of joy, how much 
more is it, when we are the means of secur- 
ing to others eternal happiness? Who that 
ever looked upon the face of the beloved 
Pardee, but felt that the benignant smile 
which lit up the face of that good man, as 
with perpetual sunshine, was no mere acci- 
dent of birth or fortune, but a part of that 
inheritance which Christ bequeathed to his 
followers in all generations, — "that they 
might have my joy fulfilled in themselves." 
It was Christ's own joy lighting up, as with 
heavenly radiance, the face of the man who 
had given himself with singleness of heart 
to the doing of Christ's work, the saving of 
souls. 




XXVII. 

CHARITY FOR THE HETERODOX. 

(Luke x. 25-37.) 

T^WO things in human nature are pecu- 
•*- liarly humiliating. First, animosity 
between men is intense in proportion to the 
nearness of the relationship. No quarrels 
are so bitter as those in the same family. 
Secondly, men are more unforgiving to- 
wards those who differ from them in opin- 
ion than towards those who have done 
some actual wrong. A criminal may be 
pardoned, but for a heretic there is no quar- 
ter. The bitterness of the odium theologicum 
has passed into a proverb. It seems to be 
one of the delusions by which Satan cheats 
us, that hatred of heresy passes with us as 
zeal for the truth. If we happen to be of 
the number of those who say 67zibboleth, 
woe to the man who says *Sibboleth in our 



CHARITY FOR THE HETERODOX. l6l 

presence ! War to the knife will show him 
how we love the truth. The Jews of old 
were comparatively tolerant of Greeks and 
Romans, of Assyrians and Babylonians ; 
they fraternized to a criminal extent with 
the grossly idolatrous Canaanites, the wor- 
shippers of Baal and Astarte : but towards 
the Samaritans — who were worshippers of 
the true God, who held the Pentateuch, 
who were only slightly alienated either in 
blood or religion — they had the most intense 
and bitter hatred. 

Our Lord's parable of the Good Samaritan, 
therefore, seems intended to teach a lesson 
somewhat different from that general love to 
enemies which is inculcated in the Sermon 
on the Mount, different even from that uni- 
versal brotherhood of man, in illustration 
of which it is often quoted. The " lawyer," 
who furnished the occasion for this most 
beautiful parable, was glib enough in regard 
to the general duties of humanity. He 
would have been among the foremost to 
applaud the saying of that noble Roman, 
Ho?no sum; hamani nihil a me alieniim 
-puto, — "I am a man; whatever concerns 
man concerns me." He read the law aright, 
ii 



l62 CHARITY FOR THE HETERODOX. 

— that the whole duty of man was com- 
prised in supreme love to God, and in such 
love to our neighbor as we bear to ourselves. 
But he found it hard to believe that these 
hated Samaritans could be his neighbors. 
Even when compelled to admit that in one 
instance at least a Samaritan had done a 
neighborly act, and had shown himself a 
neighbor indeed, the orthodox religionist 
gives a most reluctant assent. Our Lord 
had described the conduct of three several 
parties — the Priest, the Levite, and the Sa- 
maritan — towards the man who had been 
robbed and wounded, and turning to the 
lawyer, asked him to say distinctly, which 
of these had shown himself truly the neigh- 
bor to the one in distress. Was it the Priest, 
the Levite, or the Samaritan? The lawyer, 
unable to evade the conclusion, yet unwill- 
ing to let the hateful name pass his lips, 
replied, by a mean, half-hearted circum- 
locution, — "He that had mercy on him ! " 

Why not say at once, "The Samaritan ?" 
His Jewish bigotry made that name stick 
in his throat. The odium theologicum rose 
up and choked the utterance. He could 
admit the truth in general terms, of who- 



CHARITY FOR THE HETERODOX. 163 

ever would do such a deed of mercy, but 
not specifically of "the Samaritan!" He 
had still at heart the feeling of his co-reli- 
gionists, on another occasion, who, when 
they wished to express their extreme ab- 
horrence of Jesus, exclaimed, w Say we not 
well that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a 
devil?" The taint of heterodoxy was in 
their eyes, and in the eyes of this lawyer, 
the one unpardonable sin. Better to be a 
heathen, an idolater, a blasphemer, an 
atheist, than " a Samaritan ! " Such was 
the feeling, if not expressed in so many 
words ; such is too often the feeling, in all 
ages of the world, among all sects; such is 
one of the humiliating perversities of poor 
human nature. We are less tolerant of 
those who almost hold with us, but yet dif- 
fer from us, than of those who are entirely 
outside of our pale ; we are less tolerant of 
those who differ from us in religious creed, 
than of those who are guilty of actual crime. 
Jesus would teach us to be charitable to- 
wards those who are not orthodox. This 
seems to be the peculiar lesson of the Good 
Samaritan. Not that we should be indif- 
ferent to the truth of religious opinions, or 



164 CHARITY FOR THE HETERODOX. 

to the purity of religious worship, but that 
Christian sects should dwell more upon the 
points in which th£y agree, and less upon 
those in which they differ, and that we 
should never shrink from fraternizing with 
one of a kindly heart, because he happens 
to be a Samaritan ; because he says Sibboleth 
instead of Shibboleth ; because he does not 
belong to our particular corridor in the 
household of faith. 




XXVIII. 

SIGHT TO THE BLIND. 

(John ix. 1-12.) 

npWO things are especially noticeable in 
■*■ regard to the miracles of our Lord. 
First, they are beneficent. With rare ex- 
ceptions, such as the cursing of the barren 
fig-tree, they are performed for the relief 
of some human suffering, such as curing 
fevers, cleansing leprosy, casting out un- 
clean spirits, creating a miraculous supply 
of food, giving strength to the paralytic, 
hearing to the deaf, and so on. In this re- 
spect, the miracles recorded in the Gospels 
differ notably from the "lying wonders" of 
false religions. The other peculiarity, still 
more characteristic, is that the gospel mira- 
cles are almost always illustrative of spiritual 
truth. Almost every one of these wonderful 
works, if not directly and intentionally a 



l66 SIGHT TO THE BLIND. 

type, yet substantially illustrates some of 
the great doctrines which Christ taught. 
His works and his words go together in 
the teaching of gospel truth. The cleans- 
ing of the leper shows how the leprosy of 
sin is to be cleansed. Our spiritual maladies 
are to be removed, and our spiritual food is 
to be supplied, by the same power that cast 
out the demons and that multiplied the loaves 
and fishes. 

Both of these characters are strongly 
marked in the miraculous cure of the blind 
man who sat by the way-side begging. It 
was a priceless boon to him, — it is an 
equally precious lesson to us. 

In one of the public schools of New Jersey 
is a poor girl, about fifteen years old, whose 
talents have awakened considerable interest 
in her behalf. She is so very near-sighted, 
however, that in reading or study her face 
almost touches the book, and this difficulty, 
it was supposed, would debar her from the 
occupation of teaching, for which she had 
a special desire, and in other respects an 
unusual fitness. A friend who had become 
interested in her case, took her to McAllis- 
ter's, and had her fitted with two sets of 



SIGHT TO THE BLIND. 167 

glasses, — one for near and one for distant 
vision, — so that she could read a book at the 
ordinary distance, and so that she could see 
objects afar off as other people do. It was 
curious to notice the effects upon her intelli- 
gent face — the wonder, admiration, grati- 
tude, and joy that spoke from every feature 
— as for the first time in her life she looked 
out, as other people do, into the streets and the 
fields, and saw with recognition the varied 
panorama of life moving before her eyes. 
It was evident that before this time she had 
never seen, with distinctness enough to know 
it, any object ten feet from her. The world, 
with its ten thousand sights, the green fields, 
the distant woods, the varied landscape, the 
gorgeous canopy of heaven, now for the first 
time stood before her. It was in truth a 
revelation. It brought her a rich experi- 
ence of which before she had no conception, 
and although it is now but three months 
since the thing took place, it has already 
wrought a striking change in the very char- 
acter of her face, giving it a life and expres- 
siveness and beauty to which before it was 
a stranger. 

The optician has conferred upon this poor 



1 68 SIGHT TO THE BLIND. 

girl a priceless boon. How much greater 
was the boon that Christ conferred, when to 
the blind beggar by the way-side he gave 
the precious gift of sight ! But the benefi- 
cence of such a miracle is one that needs no 
demonstration. The deed speaks of good- 
ness quite as much as of power. 

But, as we are corrupt, and need cleans- 
ing from the leprosy of sin ; as we are impo- 
tent, and need the strengthening of divine 
grace ; as we have evil passions, that need to 
be cast out, — so are we all by nature blind. 
The way-side Bartimeus is the type of every 
one of us in our unconverted state, and the 
miracle that was performed upon him aptly 
shadows forth the work that is to be wrought 
upon us. There is no cry which we should 
send up more earnestly than this : Lord, 
help us to see ! 

The prayer for light should be uttered by 
the converted man as well as by the uncon- 
verted. Often even those whose eyes have 
been opened still see but dimly. They see 
men only as trees walking ; they are like 
the near-sighted girl in our story, and see 
only what is within a few inches of their 
face. Christ is a skilful optician, as well 



SIGHT TO THE BLIND. 169 

as a mighty oculist. He can give us new- 
powers : he can teach us to use more wisely 
the powers we have ; he can change for us 
the focus of vision, or he can bring the 
things needed within our range. He is as 
able and as willing to cure our spiritual 
blindness, as in the days of his flesh he was 
ready to cure bodily blindness. 

How it is that Christ works this change 
in our minds, we cannot explain. We can 
only say, with Bartimeus : " One thing I 
know, that whereas I was blind, now r I see." 
For that matter, we can in the final analysis 
give no explanation of natural vision. We 
know the results ; the process eludes our 
grasp. The Holy Spirit, whom Christ sends, 
can in some way influence our spirits, direct- 
ly, powerfully. As in the beginning he said, 
"Let there be light, and there w r as light," so 
now he can cause light to shine into the 
chaos of our minds ; he can give sight to 
the spiritually blind ; he can make the near- 
sighted to see things afar off. 

The influence of the Holy Spirit is the 
mightiest educating power abroad in the 
world. The Holy Spirit is the true edu- 
cator of the race. There is no greater 



I70 SIGHT TO THE BLIND. 

mistake the teacher can make, than to for- 
get or ignore this fact. The teacher, of 
all men, needs wisdom, and wisdom is the 
gift of the Holy Spirit. He often makes us 
truly wise. We need his help, not only for 
our own guidance, but for the increase of 
knowledge in our pupils. As we should 
pray that right thoughts may come to our 
minds, and right words come to our tongues 
wherewith to communicate our thoughts, so 
we should pray that the minds of our schol- 
ars may be in a right frame for receiving 
what we communicate, that it may not be as 
water spilt on the ground. Prayer, there- 
fore, just as much as study, is required in 
that preparation which the teacher must 
make before coming to his class. And let 
our prayer not be of the make-believe sort. 
When we- read the story of the blind man in 
the Gospel applying to Jesus for the gift of 
sight, we are certain Jesus will give it. 
Let us put forth the same assurance, when 
we ask that the Holy Spirit will give light 
to our minds and to the minds of our schol- 
ars; let us pray more over our lessons, 
even if we read less in the commentaries. 
One ray of light, direct from the heavenly 



SIGHT TO THE BLIND. 171 

fountain of radiance, one precious Eph- 
phatha, such as Jesus is just as ready to 
utter now as he was eighteen hundred years 
ago, is worth more to us, more to that blind 
scholar whom we are trying to guide, than 
all the accumulated lore in the massive 
volumes of Lange. 




XXIX. 

WITNESSING FOR THE TRUTH. 

(John ix. 13-34.) 

FT is a mischievous mistake to suppose 
that all which is required of us, in regard 
to questions of right and duty, is silent ac- 
quiescence. If a law of civil society is en- 
acted, and the law, though necessary and 
right, yet for some reason is obnoxious to the 
community, something more is required of a 
good citizen than silent obedience. Obedi- 
ence is, of course, his first duty. But if that 
obedience is rendered in such a way that 
his fellow-citizens do not know whether he 
obeys the law or not, or whether he obeys 
it from sincere approval or from a forced 
and reluctant acquiescence, he fails thereby 
to give to the law the support of his example, 
and in so doing fails in an important ele- 
ment of good citizenship. In like manner, 



WITNESSING FOR THE TRUTH. 173 

in matters of belief, if a doctrine is true, we 
are not fulfilling our whole duty in regard to 
it, by merely believing it to be true. We 
owe it to God, who has given us the faculties 
by which correct opinions may be formed ; 
we owe it to our fellow-men, who are so 
constituted as to be necessarily influenced 
by the opinions of others, that we make our 
opinions known. The opinions and the con- 
duct of the good are a part of the means by 
which God propagates truth and right in the 
world ; and the man who, from cowardice, or 
from shame, or from mistaken views of any 
kind, keeps his practice and his opinions so 
entirely to himself that no one knows what 
he does, or what he thinks on questions of 
right and duty, is guilty of a great wrong. 

If the precept not to let the left hand 
know what the right hand doeth teaches us 
to avoid vainglorying, so the precept not 
to hide our light under a bushel should 
teach us that there are cases in which si- 
lence is a sin. On questions of a general 
character — that is, questions about which 
all men have to form a decision — we are 
bound not only to do what is right, but to 
make known what we do ; not only to think 



174 WITNESSING FOR THE TRUTH. 

what is true, but to make known what we 
think. The necessity of this lies deep in 
human nature. The great majority of men 
are influenced, both in their opinions and 
their conduct, by what they know of the 
opinions and the conduct of others, and this 
influence is just in proportion to the general 
excellence of each one's reputed character. 
If a man is esteemed in the community as 
eminent for goodness and for the general 
soundness of his views, his opinions and 
his practice on any particular subject will 
have a corresponding weight. 

At all times, and in every community, 
there are certain questions of right and 
wrong, which meet us all, and in regard to 
which we have a right to know where each 
man stands. Testimony in such cases often 
goes farther than argument. If such a man 
believes the story, there must be something 
in it ; if such a man does the thing, I may 
do it ; if such a man refuses to do a thing, 
and declares it to be dangerous and wrong, 
I am compelled to pause before doing it. 
This doing openly what we believe to be 
right, this speaking out what we believe 
to be true, is what was meant originally 



WITNESSING FOR THE TRUTH. 175 

by martyrdom. Because the ancient mar- 
tyrs so commonly suffered for their opinions, 
the word has become in popular acceptation 
synonymous with sufferers, and martyrdom 
is supposed to mean being put to death. But 
the two things are clearly distinguishable. 
A man may suffer, and even be put to death, 
without being a martyr. Twitchell may 
have been a wretch, but he was no martyr. 
The patriarch Joseph, saying to his breth- 
ren, "God will surely visit you, and bring 
you out of this land unto the land which he 
sware to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob," 
was therein a martyr, though dying peace- 
fully in his bed, surrounded with riches and 
honor. A martyr is a witness, one who tes- 
tifies publicly to the truth. That is the 
primary meaning of the word, and therein 
consists the essence of the thing. Martyr- 
dom is witness-bearing ; it is testifying to 
others what we believe to be true. 

We are not all called to be preachers. 
Some of us would make but sorry argu- 
ments, if undertaking to convert the world 
in that way. But we are all called to be 
confessors and martyrs. We may not have 
the learning or the subtlety to confute oppo- 



176 WITNESSING FOR THE TRUTH. 

sers, but we may all say, as the poor blind 
man said to the haughty Pharisees, "One 
thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now 
I see." We may publicly adhere to Jesus, 
we may testify our love for him, and our 
belief in him, as the blind man did, though 
we do not undertake to argue the case. If, 
in a new community, a considerable num- 
ber of men secretly believe in the gospel, 
their influence is small and imperceptible. 
But let them come together and make to 
each other and before their associates a pub- 
lic profession of their faith, and they be- 
come at once a power in the community. 
Hence the great stress which Christ every- 
where lays upon the duty of professing or 
confessing his name. He knew what was 
in man, and what would necessarily be the 
effect of a rule requiring every man pub- 
licly to attest his faith in the gospel. The 
fact that, age after age, Christians have 
been a visible, organized community, each 
one a confessor for Christ, by open, public 
attestation, has had of itself a prodigious 
influence in perpetuating Christianity upon 
the earth. The influence of the Temper- 
ance organization is not so much in the 



WITNESSING FOR THE TRUTH. 1 77 

resolution which a man makes to abstain, 
as in the public declaration of that resolve. 
The fact that a man has said that he will do 
a thing, fortifies his resolution to do it. So 
also the fact that a man makes and repeats 
a formal declaration of his belief in any set 
of doctrines, has, by the very constitution of 
the human mind, a tendency to confirm his 
faith in those doctrines. They become, by 
frequent repetition, a part of his mental 
habit and constitution ; they form a part 
of the man himself. The universal accept- 
ance and the constant daily use of that pre- 
cious formula of Christian doctrine, known 
as The Apostles' Creed, has saved many a 
noble mind from shipwreck, has prevented 
many a nation, in time of deep degeneracy, 
from going totally astray. 

There is, moreover, something in the very 
form of this creed which makes it pecu- 
liarly suited to the office of bearing witness 
to the truth. There is a direct personality 
about it, which gives it a strange sort of 
living power. It is not an abstract, imper- 
sonal assertion, "There is a God, Father, 
Son, and Holy Ghost." It is something 
more ever* than saying, " We believe." It is 

12 



I78 WITNESSING FOR THE TRUTH. 

"/," each man for himself, giving the most 
intense personality to the expression, "/be- 
lieve in God the Father Almighty ! " No 
form of expression can well be conceived 
more powerful than this, either for its effect 
upon the mind of the worshipper himself, or 
for its influence in keeping the truths which 
it embodies alive in the world. Not until we 
can estimate the value of sunlight and air 
to the material w T orld, can we undertake to 
say how much is done towards the perpetu- 
ation of Christian doctrine by the fact that 
not less than one hundred millions of men, 
once a week, at least, declare publicly be- 
fore the world, each man for himself, "I 
believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker 
of heaven and earth ; and in Jesus Christ, 
his only Son our Lord," and in the other 
precious doctrines which follow. 



XXX. 

CHRIST THE DOOR. 

(John x. 1-18.) 

/^NE method of learning the Saviour's 
^-^ character is by studying the names 
which have been given him. In his dis- 
course to his disciples, in the tenth chapter 
of John, Jesus calls himself the Door. 
What ideas does this naturally suggest? 
What does it teach us concerning the char- 
acter and work of the Lord Jesus Christ? 

In English, the word door is used with ref- 
erence to a house, or a building of any kind 
that has a roof, while gate is the term ap- 
plied to a yard, a field, or an enclosure of any 
kind which is open to the sky. The origi- 
nal word here employed is used without 
reference to this distinction, and means that 
which gives entrance to any sort of enclos- 



l8o CHRIST THE DOOR. 

ure, whether with or without a roof. A 
cursory examination of the passage shows 
the kind of enclosure which w r as in the 
mind of the Saviour at the time. It was a 
sheepfold, an enclosure, partly open, partly 
covered, in which the sheep were penned 
for safe-keeping. 

What are the ordinary and obvious uses of 
such a door? 

A door is used, first of all, as a means of 
entrance. If the wall of the house or of the 
enclosure were built continuously and sol- 
idly all the way round, one could not get in- 
side at all, or if at all, only by scaling-ladders, 
or by some other difficult and dangerous 
process. Such was once the condition of the 
heavenly fold. Sin had closed the original 
door of entrance. The passage had been 
walled up with solid masonry. No door, or 
door-way, remained by which a descendant 
of Adam could gain admittance within that 
safe enclosure. We were all wandering 
sheep, straying upon the dark mountains, 
exposed to storms and to beasts of prey. 
But the divine Redeemer had pity on us, and 
opened for us a new and living way into this 
safe enclosure. He cleft asunder the solid 



CHRIST THE DOOR. l8l 

masonry which barred admission, and now 
he stands there, like a door upon its hinges, 
ready to open to every humble penitent who 
knocks for entrance. Christ's death, as an 
atoning sacrifice to divine justice, has re- 
moved the obstacles in the way of our escape 
from everlasting death, and made it possi- 
ble for us to regain the divine favor. This, 
then, is the first thing we are to learn from 
this gracious expression. Jesus stands as 
a door ready to give admittance to every 
penitent soul who seeks the divine favor 
through him. He is our means of entrance. 
A door is used, secondly, as a means 
of protection. When the sheep are within 
the fold the door is closed, both to keep 
them in and to keep intruders out. No one 
is allowed' to enter who w T ill worry or devour 
the flock ; no sheep can stray fatally who 
has once been admitted into that safe retreat. 
There is security and peace to all that are 
in the fold of Christ. He stands as a door, 
not only to open to them when they come in, 
but to close behind them when they are 
in, — to protect them equally against the as- 
saults of the adversary and against the evils 
of their own hearts. How firm he is to re- 



l82 CHRIST THE DOOR. 

sist us, when we are inclined to go astray ! 
How he shapes events so as to hedge up our 
way ! All the resources of nature, all the 
ordinances of the gospel and the means of 
grace, all the power of conscience and of the 
Holy Ghost acting upon the heart and con- 
science, are at his disposal, and he uses 
them with a wisdom and a power and a firm- 
ness equal to his love, in keeping us within 
the fold into which he has once brought us. 
And not only can he thus protect us from 
the evils of our own hearts, but he can shield 
us from the attacks of others, who would as- 
sail us with temptations beyond our strength. 
We may at times be alarmed, and filled 
with terror, as are the sheep within the fold, 
when they hear the howling of the wolves 
without ; but there is no real danger to them 
who are in Christ Jesus. When next we see 
some ponderous oaken door, with its bars and 
bolts of massive iron, let us think how firm 
and strong is Christ, our door, and how per- 
fect is the security to all those who put their 
trust in him. 

A door is used, thirdly, as a means of 
exclusion. Our idea of Christ is not com- 
plete, unless we remember that he excludes 



CHRIST THE DOOR. I S3 

from the kingdom of heaven, as well as 
admits to it. As he openeth and no man 
shutteth, so he shutteth and no man open- 
eth (Revelation iii. 7). As it is his to say 
"Come, ye blessed of my Father," so it is 
his to say " Depart, ye cursed." He has 
the keys of death and of hell, as well as 
the keys of heaven. He is a Judge, as 
well as a Saviour. This is a feature in 
Christ's character and work which some 
people are too dainty to speak of. While 
doubtless it is not wise to dwell too much 
upon the terrors of the world to come, yet 
in our teachings we may not ignore those 
terrible truths which formed so considerable 
a portion of our Lord's own words. While 
nothing can exceed the tenderness with 
which he pleads and expostulates with sin- 
ners, yet he has words of rebuke and anger 
for the impenitent. The Scriptures speak 
expressly of the "wrath of the Lamb," of 
his being "revealed in flaming fire, taking 
vengeance " on them that obey not his gos- 
pel. The same lips that uttered the beati- 
tudes, and that said to the disciples "Let 
not your hearts be troubled," spake also of 
the damnation of hell and of the worm that 



184 CHRIST THE DOOR. 

dieth not. Though at the proper time, and 
to those who come in the proper spirit, his 
words are very gracious, and the promise 
is that "to him that knocketh it shall be 
opened " ; yet to those who continue in sin 
beyond the limits of forbearance, his lan- 
guage is that of stern, unyielding rebuke. 
Though they "stand without and knock" 
for admittance, the door is shut against 
them; he says to them, "I know you not, 
whence ye are ; depart ! " 

When, therefore, Christ says, "I am the 
Door," he teaches us these three impressive 
truths, that by him, if at all, we gain ad- 
mittance into the kingdom ; by him we are 
protected and kept in safety after our en- 
trance ; by him, if we remain impenitent, 
we shall be finally and for ever excluded. 
As the open door is universally the symbol 
of welcome, so the door shut has among 
all people been the sign of despair and 
final doom. 

Christ, the Door, then, invites, encour- 
ages, warns. Let us heed the lesson in all 
its aspects ; and whenever we enter our 
own door, when we close it at night for 
protection to ourselves and our household, 



CHRIST THE DOOR. 185 

or to shut out unwelcome intruders, let it 
not be deemed irreverent if we also think of 

Christ, the Door of entrance for us ; 

Christ, the Door for our protection; 

Christ, the Door closed against the un- 
godly ! 








^h ^g^g 



XXXI. 

THE DOCTRINE OF THE RESUR- 
RECTION. 

(John xi. 17-27.) 

TT is difficult to divest ourselves of any 
-*- common belief, and to place ourselves, 
even in imagination, in the condition of a 
people among whom such belief does not 
exist. The belief that the souls of men are 
immortal, and that the bodies of men will, 
after death, be raised again, is so common 
among us that we can hardly imagine a 
people to whom these ideas are strangers. 
Yet such was the actual condition of the 
heathen world before the coming of Christ. 
These doctrines were but dimly appre- 
hended, even among the people of God in 
the Old Testament dispensation. If con- 
tained at all in the Old Testament, they are 
contained rather by way of inference and 



DOCTRINE OF THE RESURRECTION. 1 87 

assumption, than by clear and explicit decla- 
ration. Among the heathen philosophers 
was here and there one, like Socrates and 
Plato, who held the doctrine of the soul's 
immortality, if not with assured belief, yet 
with longing desire, and as something ex- 
tremely probable. But, among the toiling 
millions, the doctrine was practically un- 
known. 

Some thirty or forty years ago, an in- 
genious and thoughtful American, Captain 
Symmes, conceived the idea that the earth 
was hollow, and that at each pole was a 
large circular entrance or hole, through 
which navigators might sail into the interior 
of the globe. He collected many curious 
facts, which seemed no otherwise explain- 
able, except on his theory, and he tried to 
organize an expedition for the purpose of 
putting the theory to the test. He died in 
the midst of his researches, and his belief 
died out with him. In like manner, in all 
countries, and in all ages of the world, there 
have been individuals who have had glimp- 
ses, assured beliefs perhaps, of one or more 
of the doctrines familiar to Christianity. 
But such beliefs have been limited to a few 



IOO DOCTRINE OF THE RESURRECTION. 

individuals, and have died with them. They 
have not extended into the general creed of 
the multitude. That the body, after disso- 
lution, should live again, or even that the 
soul should live for ever, was an idea as 
unknown to the common mind among the 
ancient heathen as will be the idea of 
" Symmes's Hole" to the mind of the Ameri- 
cans and Europeans of the next century. 

It marks a mighty change, a prodigious 
progress, in human thought, that these two 
affiliated doctrines should in all Christian 
countries, and to some extent even in hea- 
then countries, be now received into the 
beliefs of mankind with almost the univer- 
sality with which air is received into their 
lungs. It is so of many other important 
ideas which now form universal elements 
of belief. They are the fruits of Christ's 
teachings, as recorded in the New Testa- 
ment Scriptures, and as propagated and 
perpetuated by his followers. 

Christ's mode of teaching was peculiar. 
He did not argue or demonstrate, in the or- 
dinary sense of that word. He first gave 
by miracle full evidence of his divine mis- 
sion, showing incontestably that he was a 



DOCTRINE OF THE RESURRECTION. 189 

teacher come from God, and having estab- 
lished this point, he then declared authorita- 
tively the truths which he came to propagate. 
The disciples received his doctrines, not be- 
cause he had demonstrated the truth of them 
by logic or by a course of reasoning, but be- 
cause he asserted them. We are expressly 
told that he taught as one having authority. 
The full and explicit declarations which he 
made in regard to the continued existence 
of the soul after this life, and especially in 
regard to the resurrection of the body, took 
strong hold of the minds of his disciples, 
and entered at once and for ever into the uni- 
versal consciousness of the church. The oft- 
recurring Resurgam ("I shall rise again") 
of the catacombs, shows how these doctrines 
had seized the imagination of the early 
Christians. 

In teaching these truths now, we may 
find perhaps some faint analogies to them 
in the annual revival of the vegetable king- 
dom. The plants and flowers die in winter 
to come to life again in fresh beauty and 
vigor on the following summer. Doubtless 
there is much that is suggestive in this 
annual resurrection of the vegetable w r orld. 



I90 DOCTRINE OF THE RESURRECTION. 

But, after all, it is no proof that man will rise. 
Man is akin, not to the plants, but to the 
lower animals, and the lower animals die 
before his eyes and do not rise again. These 
animals live and move .as he does, — they 
have blood and muscles and nerves ; they 
have a digestive apparatus and powers of 
locomotion ; they have bodily senses ; they 
can see and hear and taste and smell and 
touch; they can, to some extent, feel and 
think and remember ; they can fear and hope 
and rejoice ; they can bear anger and malice, 
just as he does. They, not the plants, are 
his analogues. If, when the body of his 
faithful dog or horse was laid in the ground 
and dissolved into its elements, it should be 
reorganized, and come to life again on the 
following spring, man might reasonably con- 
clude that a like result awaited his own 
dissolution. But how is it now? No resur- 
rection occurs to that part of creation which 
most nearly approaches himself. The lower 
animals, even those which come nearest to the 
human race in endowments, all die, and are 
no more for ever. Why should not a like 
destiny befall man, their nearest congener? 
Let us not hesitate to admit the truth in 



DOCTRINE OF THE RESURRECTION. I9I 

this matter. Reason does not teach the doc- 
trine of the immortality of the soul even, 
much less that of the resurrection of the 
body. We are not left to that poor prop for 
the support of these glorious truths ; they 
rest upon the immutable basis of Christ's 
repeated, solemn, explicit declarations. The 
soul of man is immortal, not because there 
is in mind itself any thing inherently inde- 
structible, — else the brutes would live for 
ever, for brutes have some sparks of reason 
and intellect, — but because God has deter- 
mined thus to give unending existence to the 
human soul ; and we know that God has so 
determined, because Christ has explicitly 
declared it. We believe it, because he says 
so. We believe also that our bodies will 
rise, not because there is in them any natu- 
ral tendency to rise, not because it is in 
itself reasonable or probable that they should 
rise, but because Christ has solemnly de- 
clared it. The resurrection of Lazarus, and 
still more that of Christ himself, shows that 
the resurrection of the human body is pos- 
sible ; the annual restoration of the plants 
and vegetables gives us some analogies by 
which faintly to conceive how the human 



I92 DOCTRINE OF THE RESURRECTION. 

body shall reappear after its dissolution, 
while the fact that it shall so reappear is 
placed beyond all peradventure by the au- 
thoritative and explicit declaration of the 
eternal Son of God. He is the Resurrection 
and the Life. Because he lives, we shall 
live; because he rose, we shall rise. 

There is no lack of arguments for general 
purity of living, and for temperance in the 
indulgence of our bodily appetites. But 
here is one peculiarly weighty to a thought- 
ful mind. How can I bear to pollute, by de- 
bauch or by low sensual indulgence, that 
which is to be my inseparable companion in 
all the bright scenes of the world to come? 
Will it not add to the heavenly bliss to know 
that the body wherewith I shall appear among 
those shining ones has never known pollu- 
tion, sin, or shame? 




XXXII. 

"IF THOU HADST BEEN HERE!" 
(John xi. 20-32.) 

HPHE commentators have done scant jus- 
•*■ tice to the character of Martha. Be- 
cause, on one occasion, she received a mild 
rebuke for an error which, after all, had its 
root in affection for the Master, she has 
somehow, in the mind of the church, become 
a type of household worldliness, while Mary 
is the exclusive model of spiritual mind- 
edness. There is, however, no such sharp 
contrast between the sisters. Martha was, 
perhaps, the more active and demonstrative ; 
Mary, the more meditative and quiet. But 
the points in which they agreed far exceed- 
ed any of these minor points of difference. 
They were both, wholly devoted to the ser- 
vice of Christ, and fully persuaded of his 
divine character and mission. From no 

13 



i 9 4 

one of the Twelve, not even from Peter, 
have we a more full and explicit declaration 
of faith in Jesus, as the Messiah and the 
Son of God, than we have from these loving 
women at the time of their brother's death, 
and that not after, but before, the stupen- 
do»s miracle of his resurrection. " I believe 
that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, 
which should come into the world !" Such 
is the bold, out-spoken faith of these women, 
even in that dark hour when the angel of 
death was still in their household. Martha, 
hearing that Jesus was approaching the town, 
went out to meet him, and her first exclama- 
tion is, "Lord, if thou hadst been here, my 
brother had not died ! " Next Mary goes 
out, and she too says, in exactly the same 
words, "Lord, if thou hadst been here, my 
brother had not died !" 

w If thou hadst been here ! " What un- 
questioning faith in Christ's power do these 
words imply ! what assured conviction of 
his sympathy ! what love for his person ! — 
for the deeper our grief, the more do we 
long for the presence of those we love best. 
It is the language of Christian experience 
all the world over. When sorrow comes, 



"if thou hadst been here!" 195 

then we would have Christ here too, either 
to keep the calamity away, or to help us to 
bear it. 

In the case of Lazarus, Jesus stayed away 
on purpose, that the disease might take its 
usual course and that death might ensue. 
If Lazarus had not died, one precious oppor- 
tunity would have been, lost for displaying 
the Saviour's divine power and his equally 
divine compassion. He had healed all kinds 
of disease, in scores and scores of cases, be- 
fore their eyes, and in behalf, oftentimes, of 
mere strangers. Had he, therefore, been 
present at the home of Lazarus during the 
progress of the disease it would have been 
a hard trial, indeed, for these loving sisters, 
the intimate personal friends of Jesus, if he 
had not spoken the word and healed their 
brother. It was in mercy, therefore, that 
he was not there. He stayed away that he 
might have the opportunity of showing the 
most notable example of his power as the 
Son of God, and of his tender sympathy as 
the Son of man. 

Jesus is often absent from those he loves, 
at least he withholds from them the signs 
of his presence, because he has towards 



196 "if thou hadst been here!" 

them designs of mercy. He allows death 
to take away a husband, a brother, a child, 
a friend, in order that he may repair the loss 
in some way that we shall feel to be compen- 
sation a thousand-fold. 

" If thou hadst been here ! " It is not the 
language of complaint, but of loving desire ; 
and surely there is no sin in wishing that 
Jesus had been with us in any extremity of 
pain or sorrow. Perhaps it was bodily pain 
that came upon me with intolerable force ; 
and when I thought of the many cases in 
which by a word, a touch, a look, he had 
caused pain to cease, was it wrong for me to 
cry out — Oh, that he were here to soothe 
these raging nerves, to send some remedy 
for these bodily tortures ! 

When the late editor * of the " American 
Sunday-school Union " was called to grapple 
with disease in its most appalling form, and 
cancer ate its slow and deadly path from 
point to point over the familiar features, 
destroying a vigorous and manly life by the 
mere exhaustion of suffering, how often 
might the sufferer, how often might those 

* Frederick A. Packard. 



"if thou hadst been here!" 197 

who tended him, have uttered the cry — Oh, 
that He were here ! 

A loving wife for eighteen long years 
watched the bedside of her husband, as 
during all that time he lay a dying of pain ! 
The patient sufferer at New Hartford has 
now been for thirty-five years a victim to 
excruciating bodily pain, which at times be- 
comes anguish that seems intolerable. There 
is no name oftener upon the lips of that lone 
sufferer, there was none oftener upon the 
lips of that loving wife, than the name of 
Jesus. Oh, that He were here, was the 
continual cry of both, — not in complaint, 
not in impatience, but with loving, longing 
desire. 




XXXIII. 



JESUS WEPT. 



(John xi. 33-44.) 

TT was foretold of the Messiah that he 
-*- should be a man of sorrows. That was 
a leading feature in his character. He was 
to be a sufferer — subject to poverty, bodily 
toil and pain, anguish of mind, contumely, 
torture, imprisonment, and death. As the 
prophets foreshadowed him, so the evangel- 
ists describe his actual career. Though not 
without his moments of solace, yet for the 
most part he led the life of a fugitive and a 
wanderer, not having even where to lay his 
head. Yet, intensified as this life of suffer- 
ing was, especially towards the close, though 
it sometimes caused the sufferer to groan ; 
though, at one time, being in agony, he 
prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was 
as it were great drops of blood, falling down 



JESUS WEPT. I99 

to the ground, yet we are not told that his 
own sufferings ever caused him to shed a 
tear. He "wept" on two memorable occa- 
sions only, — when he looked over Jerusalem 
and thought of the impending woes which 
were to come upon its inhabitants, his coun- 
trymen, and when he saw the sorrow of 
the two stricken sisters on account of their 
brother's death. 

Nothing in all the gospel history shows 
us so clearly that Jesus was a man, with 
perfect human sympathies, as the brief but 
touching record, "Jesus wept ! " 

His miracles, though performed without 
ostentation, though studiously free from 
every thing like scenic effect, were yet, in 
themselves, such stupendous exercises of 
power, that even his disciples, and those ad- 
mitted to his most familiar daily companion- 
ship, found it difficult to divest themselves 
of a certain nameless awe in his presence. 

As with his works, so with his words. 
Though he was gracious and gentle, and 
the law of kindness was upon his lips, — 
though the Godhead that was in him was 
mercifully veiled, yet it could not be all con- 
cealed. Not only he did such works as no 



200 JESUS WEPT. 

other man ever did, but he spake such 
words as no mere man ever spake. There 
was something about his utterances that 
differed from those of all other men. He 
speaks, not as one who has gained knowl- 
edge by study and research, who has reached 
conclusions by reasoning and logic, but 
as one who knows all things by direct, 
divine intuition. This gives a mysterious 
grandeur to his discourses, which all hearts 
unconsciously feel, though they may not 
stop to analyze or define the feeling. 

Besides this, there is another class of utter- 
ances which mark the teachings of our Lord. 
Though gentle to the meek, no Roman cen- 
sor was ever more stern in the rebuke of 
those who were hypocritical and pretentious ; 
no tribune more inexorable towards official 
oppressors. His language, at times, is 
appalling: fc O generation of vipers! who 
hath warned you to flee from the wrath to 
come ? " " Why tempt y e me , ye hypocrites f " 
<? Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypo- 
crites!" "Ye serpents, ye generation of 
vijierS) how can ye escape the damnation 
of hell ? " Imagine a religious teacher nowa- 
days addressing words like these to men 



JESUS WEPT. 20I 

holding such positions in the church as the 
late Bishop White, of Pennsylvania; Dr. 
Dwight, of New Haven ; or Dr. Alexander, 
of Princeton ! In fact, we have among us no 
religious teachers holding positions of such 
commanding authority as that held by the 
Pharisees and scribes, whom Jesus thus ad- 
dressed. It is necessary for us to conceive 
rightly of the high official position and char- 
acter of these men, to think who the Pharisees 
and scribes were, before we can comprehend 
the full, grand import of Christ's terrible 
words. 

The greatest of human poets speaks of 
the divinity that doth hedge a king. There 
is something of this restraining awe about 
the words, the doings, the personal presence, 
of this more than kingly man. It is only 
when he stands in the house of mourning, 
when the hearts of loving sisters are wrung 
with anguish, and the wail of domestic sor- 
row reaches his ear, that his voice becomes 
most distinctly human. Then, if ever, we 
feel that he is one who can be touched with 
the feeling of our infirmities, who will not 
break the bruised reed, or quench the smok- 
ing flax. 



202 JESUS WEPT. 

All else that has ever been written to 
comfort the mourner is not worth so much as 
this one precious record,- — the briefest, the 
sweetest in the Scriptures, — "Jesus wept !" 
It does not tell the stricken one to dry his 
tears ; it does not preach a cold and heart- 
less stoicism. It says, rather, "Weep on, 
sorrowful one; I, the man of sorrows, 
mingle my tears with yours/' 

In any crushing sorrow, it is sympathy 
we want, not compassion. Compassion 
looks down upon us, and makes us feel more 
keenly our low estate. Sympathy goes into 
the valley with us. It puts itself on our 
level ; it feels with us, rather than for us ; 
it feels as we feel ; it puts its heart along- 
side of ours, and makes us understand that 
both throb to the same tune. 

The wondrous works of Jesus, and his 
still more wondrous words, the divine dig- 
nity and grandeur of his character, awaken 
in us feelings of love and veneration. The 
sorrows he bore for us, in the work of expi- 
ation, awaken our gratitude. But it is his 
manhood that touches our hearts, that lifts 
us up from the depths, that makes us feel, 



JESUS WEPT. 203 

in every extremity of woe and anguish, that 
we have in him an all-sufficient, sympathiz- 
ing friend. 

To the true believer, there is no medicine 
for the heartache equal to the recollection 
of those two words, "Jesus wept I* 




*s*h^b 



XXXIV. 

THE AGONY OF ENTRANCE INTO 
CHRIST'S KINGDOM. 

(Luke xiii. 23-30.) 

r I ^HE word agony meant originally the 
■*■ violent bodily exertion used by wres- 
tlers and other combatants in the Grecian 
games. In these contests of bodily strength 
and skill, in which men put forth their ut- 
most force, the limbs and features were often 
greatly distorted, both by the violence of 
the muscular contractions and by the men- 
tal earnestness and passion accompanying 
the struggle. But these physical distortions 
indicate pain, as well as effort, and so the 
word by a natural and familiar metonymy 
has passed into common speech to signify 
excessive pain. But between these two 
meanings of the word there was an inter- 
mediate stage, in which it meant, and it still 



ENTRANCE INTO CHRIST S KINGDOM. 205 

sometimes means, violent spiritual effort or 
conflict, similar in earnestness to the bodily 
effort put forth by the wrestlers in the arena. 
This idea of a spiritual agony — a conflict in 
which the soul had to put forth the most in- 
tense and painful exercise of its powers — 
was the one familiar to the writers of the 
New Testament, and was in the mind of Jesus 
when he gave the exhortation, "Strive to 
enter at the strait gate." The original is, 
"Be in an agony to enter in." It is a word 
expressive of the most intense earnestness 
and effort. The phrase " at the strait gate " 
(literally, " through the narrow door ") points 
the same way. The door is so narrow, it re- 
quires some squeezing to get through. 

This striking exhortation — so practical, so 
earnest, so alarming in some of its features 
— was the answer given by our Saviour to a 
question that seemed to be prompted by 
mere idle curiosity, or perhaps by a spirit 
of captiousness. There are those still who 
are curious to know whether there are many 
or few to be saved, to know what will be the 
fate of the heathen who have never heard of 
a Saviour, to know whether we shall rec- 
ognize our friends in heaven, to know how 



206 THE AGONY OF ENTRANCE 

freedom of human will can be reconciled 
with the doctrine of divine election and pre- 
destination, or how the doctrine of an end=- 
less hell can be reconciled with the character 
of a kind and merciful Father. These ques- 
tions certainly are not devoid of interest. 
But many persons now, as in the time of 
our Saviour, make the study of curious 
points in theology a substitute for personal 
religion. They think they are religious be- 
cause they talk much about religious ques- 
tions. One question in regard to his kingdom, 
the Saviour would have us to understand, 
takes precedence of all others : Have I my- 
self entered in ? Let all other questions, 
all curious speculations about God and his 
government, be postponed until this great 
practical point is settled. Until this is se- 
cure, we may well be in agony. 

There are some aspects of Christ's charac- 
ter and teaching that are almost appalling; 
there are utterances of his which it is diffi- 
cult to contemplate without a recoil. In 
reading the Gospels we are like a traveller, 
who sees outstretched before him a bound- 
less paradise of all that is pleasing to the 
eye, while behind him, at his very feet, is 



into Christ's kingdom. 207 

a yawning abyss, many thousand fathoms 
deep, which it makes his brain dizzy even 
to look down upon. No religious teacher 
ever spoke more benignant, more alluring, 
more comforting words ; yet none, also, has 
spoken words of sterner denunciation, or 
threatenings more crowded with images of 
horror and despair. It is the author of the 
beatitudes who speaks of the worm that 
dieth not and of the fire that is not quenched ; 
of outer darkness where there shall be 
weeping and gnashing of teeth ; of him 
who after he hath killed the body, hath 
power to kill the soul also ; of everlasting 
punishment, and of the damnation of hell ! 
These are awful words, and are the more 
"appalling from the gracious and benignant 
character of him who uttered them. Only 
the most assured knowledge of the dread 
reality of these things could have led him, 
the meekest and most patient of men, to 
utter words of such grievous import ; and 
well might he, in view of such dread issues, 
startle his curious questioner with the injunc- 
tion, " Agonize , agonize, to enter in !" 

No one, probably, ever did enter into 
Christ's kingdom without agony. Not, 



208 ENTRANCE INTO CHRIST'S KINGDOM. 

blessed be God, to make a door of entrance. 
That has been already done. Christ is him- 
self the door, and the door is open. The 
difficulty lies in ourselves. We are totally 
averse to entering, or we want to enter 
carrying our sins with us, and the door is 
too narrow to admit us and our burdens too. 
We must enter free from all encumbrances. 
Christ's language, then, stripped of meta- 
phor, teaches that there is in us an inborn 
antagonism to the principles of his kingdom, 
and that in becoming his followers we shall 
have a fierce and desperate struggle, a spir- 
itual agony, which will tax our powers to 
the utmost. We must yield our wills to his 
will. This is the first condition of disciple- 
ship, and all experience proves it is no* 
easy task. There is no harder agony in 
this world than that in which a human soul 
for the first time subjects its will absolutely 
to the will of another, even though that 
other be God its Maker. 



t 



XXXV. 



SPEECHLESS. 



(Matthew xxii. 2-14.) 

"jVTO one word conveys so vivid an idea of 
^ utter, inexpressible woe, as the word 
speechless. It is not only to be doomed, 
and to be doomed without hope of restora- 
tion, but to be doomed on grounds of such 
manifest justice, and after such manifold 
aggravation of guilt, that we have not a 
word to say. As there is a fulness of joy, 
in which the heart can only be still before 
its God in the intensity of its rapture, so 
there is a fulness of woe and of guilt, at 
which the soul, awakened to its true con- 
dition, stands aghast, in the inexpressible 
agony of mute despair. 

That a word like this should be used by 
the Lord Jesus to express his estimate of 
the condition and character of those who 
14 



2IO SPEECHLESS. 

reject his gospel, may give us a new view of 
the doctrine of human depravity. When 
that doctrine is set forth in positive terms, 
as in the third chapter of Romans, and in 
other passages of a like character, the reader 
is apt to feel as if the description applied 
only to the heathen world, or to the openly 
wicked and depraved. It is hard to realize 
that language of such sweeping condemna- 
tion can be properly applied to the refined, 
and in many respects exemplary and kind- 
hearted, people with whom we are daily ex- 
changing the courtesies and amenities of 
life. The parable of our Lord concerning 
the marriage of the king's son and the wed- 
ding garment, shows us, among its many 
instructive lessons, that there must be in 
human nature something desperately bad. 
The man who was "speechless" has his 
representative in every one who reads these 
lines, except so far as the special, interpos- 
ing, grace of God has made him to differ. 

Let us gather up some of the particulars 
which give point and emphasis to our Sav- 
iour's illustration. First, it is an invitation 
from a king, the representative of the high- 
est earthly dignity. In those countries where 



SPEECHLESS. 211 

kingly government prevails, the most ex- 
alted subjects count it an honor to gain ad- 
mittance to the sovereign's presence. The 
honor is still further enhanced when, instead 
of being obtained by solicitation, it is actu- 
ally offered by the sovereign of his own 
voluntary choice and motion. To refuse, 
or to treat with neglect, such an invitation, 
is counted the grossest affront. A circum- 
stance in the present case which gives still 
further aggravation to the affront, is the oc- 
casion of the proffered honor. It is no less 
an event than the marriage of the king's 
own son, an event, therefore, in which the 
king's personal feelings are enlisted. A 
prince or a noble who might neglect an 
ordinary invitation from his sovereign, would 
scarcely venture upon the hardihood of do- 
ing so on an occasion involving in the high- 
est degree the honor and dignity of the royal 
household. But that no circumstance might 
be wanting which could add to the grievous- 
ness and the ingratitude of the case, the 
person here invited is not a prince or a no- 
ble, but a pauper, — a poor, homeless vaga- 
bond, picked up by the roadside. Even this 
does not state the whole case. The king, 



212 SPEECHLESS. 

in his princely generosity and condescension, 
not only invites this outcast beggar to the 
palace, and that on the august occasion of 
the marriage of the king's son, but provides 
for him a suit of gorgeous apparel befitting 
such a presence on such an occasion ; and 
yet the outcast is so forgetful of what is due 
to his gracious benefactor as to obtrude him- 
self among the honored throng in loathsome 
garments, reeking with filth. 

Such is our case, only in every particular 
heightened by the consideration of the infi- 
nite and the heavenly as compared with 
what is earthly and finite. The King who 
has invited us is no mere earthly monarch, 
but the Lord of glory. We are invited to 
do honor to his only begotten Son, on the 
most august occasion in the history of the 
universe. As we have of ourselves no fitting 
raiment for such an occasion, the Lord of 
the feast, by a price exceeding that of the 
Koh-i-noor, or of any other crown jewel, 
has purchased for us a spotless wedding- 
garment. He sends out his royal messen- 
gers, saying, "My dinner is ready, my 
guests are assembled, enter into the joy of 
your Lord ! " Yet this amazing condescen- 



SPEECHLESS. 213 

sion is treated with the coolest unconcern. 
This unparalleled feast is rejected with in- 
difference by those who are dying of hunger. 
The thing would be incredible were it not so 
common. Its very commonness, however, 
makes the fact more amazing ! Can such 
an one be otherwise than "speechless," 
when arraigned before his final Judge? 
Must there not be something desperately 
wrong in the human heart, that it can treat 
with unconcern the gospel offer? 




XXXVI. 



HUSKS. 



(Luke xv. 11-32.) 

HTHE parable of the Prodigal Son has 
-*- been universally regarded as the crown 
and pearl of the parables. For mere beauty 
of thought and expression it is without a 
rival, not only in literature generally, but in 
the Holy Scriptures themselves. But artistic 
beauty is the least of its excellences. So 
much higher do its other merits rise, that it 
seems like a degradation even to speak of 
its superlative beauty. Its crowning glory 
is its wonderful adaptation to the spiritual 
wants of man. It has lessons for men of 
all ages and in every stage of civilization, 
and it conveys those lessons by an appeal to 
the tenderest chords of sympathy known to 
the human heart. It has been the means of 
conversion to thousands of men who seemed 



HUSKS. 215 

beyond the reach of every other influence. 
Whole volumes have been written in the 
illustration and enforcement of the many 
points of interest which it contains. A single 
expression in one of the minor details of the 
picture may give us some food for reflection 
at the present time. 

To show the extreme degradation of the 
prodigal, it is said that he would fain have 
eaten the "husks" which were used for feed- 
ing the swine, and that even this coarse food 
was withheld from him. It is not necessary, 
for the purpose of the illustration, to deter- 
mine with learned precision what was the 
exact character of the vegetable product 
here translated "husk," any more than it 
would be necessary, in the parable of the 
"lost coin," to determine whether it was an 
Attic or an Alexandrian drachma , and what 
would be its exact equivalent in modern 
money. The Greek word here used, if not 
meaning "husks" exactly, yet means un- 
doubtedly some kind of cheap, coarse food, 
fit only for that species of animal which will 
fatten even on garbage. The English word 
"husks," therefore, conveys with sufficient 
precision the essential idea of the original. 



2l6 HUSKS. 

That which this wretched man craved, in 
the extremity of his want, was the coars- 
est, the least nutritive, the most uninviting 
part of the vegetable product, — something, 
moreover, which, it is intimated, would not 
even satisfy his appetite, but only "fill his 
belly;" something, in short, equally taste- 
less and unsatisfying. Yet the men that fed 
the swine seem to have grudged him even 
this! 

Such, our Saviour would teach us, is the 
condition of the man who seeks to find in 
this world a satisfying portion for the soul. 
The enjoyments for which we give up the 
delights of our Father's house, though not 
without their attractions at first, yet end 
in husks. They do not satisfy the higher 
w r ants of our nature while they last, and 
they last only for the few short years of our 
earthly career, leaving a measureless void 
beyond the tomb. In regard to the great 
majority of men, the worldly pleasures for 
which they give up heaven are husks in the 
lowest sense. The pleasures of eating and 
drinking, the gratification of appetites which 
man has in common with the beasts of the 
field, and which literally perish in the 



HUSKS. 217 

using, — these ignoble, sensual delights are 
the price for which most men barter joys 
that angels in heaven might envy. Even 
those higher pleasures wherewith the world 
tempts the select few — the love of fame, 
the lust of power, the charms of fancy and 
imagination, the pride of birth and rank, all 
the glorious pomp and circumstance of life 
— are not only transient in duration, but they 
do not satisfy while they last. They pall 
upon the appetite ; they prove to be husks. 
Such is the uniform testimony of those who 
have tried them. 

In the very nature of things it cannot be 
otherwise. Man is made in the image of 
God. In the higher regions of his nature 
he has faculties which connect him with his 
divine original. He has aspirations and 
wants which can find no adequate resting- 
place, except in what is eternal and divine. 
In the eager pursuit of wealth or honor or 
worldly gain of any kind, the bait before us 
seems indeed good and satisfying, but in the 
mouth we find it husks. We may not grovel, 
as did the man in the parable, and yet so 
long as we look for happiness in any thing 
lower than God and heaven, we are essen- 



21 8 HUSKS. 

tially prodigals ; we have gone astray from 
our Father's house ; we are trying to live 
upon that which has in it no quality that can 
sustain life. 

There is no more cheerless and sickening 
picture than that of a life of pleasure, when 
stripped of its false coloring and seen in its 
true character. The wisest of men pro- 
nounced it "vanity of vanities." The ver- 
dict of him who was wiser than Solomon, 
is _« husks!" 




XXXVII. 



REWARD. 



(Matthew xx, 1-16.) 

nr^HE parable of the Laborers in the Vine- 
-*• yard is one which has given much 
trouble to interpreters. The interpretation 
of it is indeed beset with difficulties. The 
true way, in all such cases, is to fix the 
thoughts steadily upon the main point of 
the illustration, and to dwell lightly upon 
the minor details. In almost every parable, 
circumstances are thrown in which have no 
special application, and which are intended 
merely to fill out the picture, so as to give it 
the air of life. Nor do these unessential 
particulars at all obscure or weaken the 
main point to be illustrated. On the con- 
trary, they give it additional force and clear- 
ness. The only caution to be observed in 
the interpretation is to avoid being led 



2 20 REWARD. 

astray by attempting to give a symbolic 
and significant character to all these minor 
accessories. 

The main thought which seems to have 
been in the mind of our Lord, in uttering 
the parable just named, seems to have been 
to assert and to illustrate the idea of God's 
absolute sovereignty in the dispensation of 
his favors ("Is it not lawful for me to do 
what I will with mine own?" "Many are 
called, but few are chosen"), and to show 
at the same time how the bestowal of un- 
merited favor to one is no injury to another 
(" I do thee no wrong ; didst thou not agree 
with me for a penny?"). 

In the parable, the all-day laborers and 
the eleventh-hour laborers fare alike. Each 
receives a penny, or "denarius," — the ordi- 
nary day's wages of that time. This cir- 
cumstance, however, is merely one of the 
accessories of the picture. We are not to 
infer from it that in the kingdom of Christ 
all disciples will receive an equal portion of 
blessedness. It is no part of the design of 
the parable to teach the equality of future 
rewards. Its one doctrine is that, so long 
as God withholds not from any the full 



REWARD. 221 

measure of what they have earned, he does 
no wrong in bestowing upon others, gratui- 
tously, of his own free will and pleasure, 
more than they have earned. 

It is likewise a straining of the parable to 
infer that any one, in any strict sense of the 
term, earns future blessedness, or a reward 
in Christ's kingdom, as the laborer in the 
parable earned his "denarius." It was no 
part of the design of the parable to teach 
the doctrine either of self-righteousness or 
of imputed righteousness. But there was 
a great clamor against Christ because of the 
seemingly capricious character of his favors. 
Men who all their lives had been sober and 
moral, and even religious, were held to a 
strict reckoning, while special favor was 
shown to some who, up to a late hour of 
their lives, had been open transgressors, — 
to publicans and harlots, and even after- 
ward to the "thief on the cross." These 
eleventh-hour men receive the denarius, 
not because they have a right to it, nor be- 
cause it was promised them, for the em- 
ployer merely said, "Go, labor, and I will 
give you what is meet," but simply because 
he chose to bestow upon them an act of 
special generosity. 



222 REWARD. 

It is worthy of notice, however, that while 
in the case of the all-day laborers there was 
a regular bargain on their part, showing a 
self-righteous and exacting spirit, the elev- 
enth-hour men entered upon their work, 
short though it was, in a generous spirit 
of trust and confidence, willing to do all 
they could, and to accept without bargain 
or question whatever the Master might see 
fit to bestow. Just so far as men have any 
leaven of the Pharisaic spirit, they feel that 
God owes them something for what they 
have done. Christ says, in substance, in 
this parable, I will not stop now to argue 
the question, whether in strict justice any 
man has a claim upon God. Grant, if you 
please, that some do fully earn their dena- 
rius. If any man keeps the whole law, he 
shall live by the law. God will give him to 
the last farthing all that he has earned. But 
God has at the same time the right to give 
to others what they have not earned, and 
what they are willing and grateful to receive 
as an unmerited boon. 



XXXVIII. 

THE PRAYER OF SALOME. 

(Matthew xx. 20-28.) 

/ TPHE sons of Zebedee were James and 
- 1 - John. Salome is supposed to have 
been their mother, and likewise to have 
been the sister of Mary, the mother of our 
Lord. According to this, James and John 
were cousins of Jesus, and Salome was his 
aunt. The aunt and the two cousins, then, 
assured at length of the true Messianic 
character of their kinsman, and believing, 
apparently, that he was now soon to enter, 
by some mysterious baptism of suffering, 
upon his kingdom and glory, prostrate 
themselves before him as worshippers and 
suppliants, and make request that in his 
approaching kingdom one cousin may sit 
at his right hand, and one at his left ; that 
is, that they may have the first and second 



224 THE PRAYER OF SALOME. 

places in the kingdom. The mother and 
her two sons united in the request, although 
the mother was the chief speaker on the 
occasion, and was probably the originator 
of the scheme. It was a mother's love 
seeking the advancement of her children's 
interest. 

The prayer of Salome has been substan- 
tially the prayer of many a Christian mother 
from that day to this. With such prayers, 
though they contain manifestly an element 
of imperfection and wrong, our Lord deals 
tenderly, for they spring from true love, 
and are uttered by none but true believers. 
Salome, it is evident, believed sincerely that 
Jesus was the Christ. It was her vivid and 
strong perception of this truth that led her 
to make the request. She saw, with more 
clearness apparently than any of the disci- 
ples, that this Jesus was in truth the Lord of 
glory, and that as such he had infinite ben- 
efits to bestow ; and with true maternal in- 
stinct she began at once to think how this 
stupendous fact might be made to redound 
to the advantage of her sons. Her mistake 
lay, not in bringing them to the feet of Jesus 
and asking for them great blessings at his 



THE PRAYER OF SALOME. 225 

hand, but in specifying what those blessings 
should be. Her faith, strong though it was, 
had not yet reached the point that she could 
say to Jesus, in regard to the future interests 
of these her children, "Thy will be done." 
She wanted him to be good to them, not as 
it should seem to him wisest and best for 
them, but in that particular way which had 
struck her own fancy. 

Perhaps there is no boon more frequently 
asked by praying mothers than that their 
sons may become preachers of the gospel. 
If there is any blessing which we might 
ask absolutely, and without limitation, it 
would seem to be this. Yet there is danger 
that even in making such a request a Chris- 
tian mother may be guilty of the sin of 
Salome. That son, whom she so fondly 
desires to see in the pulpit, may not have 
the natural gifts to fit him for such a work. 
It may be that placing him in such a posi- 
tion would only be the means of bringing 
shame and sorrow, both upon him and upon 
her ; it may be that her prayer springs, not 
from a desire to see her son useful, but to see 
him occupy a shining position ; it may be 

that he has gifts by which in other spheres 
15 



226 THE PRAYER OF SALOME. 

of activity he might honor the Master much 
more than by preaching the gospel. 

Jesus knows, better than any pious mother, 
what will be best for her sons, and in what 
way they may best serve him. Let her 
pray first of all for their conversion, and 
after that let her cry be, not that they may 
sit, one on his right hand and the other on 
his left, in his kingdom, but that they may 
be blessed in his own chosen way, not 
shrinking even if he should apply to her the 
test which he applied to Salome and her 
sons. 

Praying mother, the blessing which Jesus 
has in store for your boy, may be by putting 
to his lips a cup of bitterness such as that of 
which Jesus himself tasted. It may be by 
calling him to a baptism of blood. Yet fear 
not to urge your request. Only keep down 
all worldly ambitions, and be courageous 
enough to say, in view of every possible 
contingency, "Thy will be done." 

If a praying mother should speak with sub- 
missive reserve, even when asking that her 
boy may become a minister of the gospel, how 
much more when the boon which she solicits 
is that he may be rich, or famous, or learned, 



THE PRAYER OF SALOME. 227 

or that he may be great and happy in any 
of the thousand other ways that dazzle her 
imagination. The very poorest, most de- 
graded, least imaginative of mothers will be 
found, if you get at the bottom of her heart, 
to have some ideal of happiness for her 
child better than that which constitutes his 
present surroundings. No woman ever yet 
brought a man-child into the world, that she 
did not straightway have some ambitions in 
regard to him. If she be a praying woman, 
this strong, instinctive yearning of her heart 
will find utterance in prayer ; and of all 
prayers ever uttered in this world, those of 
mothers are most importunate and most sin- 
cere. God forbid that I should speak lightly 
of this maternal impulse. The example of 
Salome is wrested from its right import, if it 
is used to restrain this natural instinct. Its 
one lesson is, not that mothers should hesi- 
tate to go with their children, like Salome, 
to the feet of Jesus, but that in their suppli- 
cations they should ever ask with entire 
submission to his most wise and gracious 
will. 



XXXIX. 

A BLIND BEGGAR. 
(Mark x. 46-52.) 

" r I ^HE poor ye have with you always." 
-*- Such is our Lord's declaration, and 
one incidental object of that arrangement 
of Providence is that God's people may 
always have opportunities for alms-giving. 
Thus far the prediction has been literally 
verified. In no age of the church, in no 
part of the world, has that class been want- 
ing, known as "the poor," — not simply 
those in straitened circumstances, but such 
as are actually dependent upon charity 
for bread. It is a sad lot for any human 
being, and it ought to awaken in us greater 
sympathy and compassion than it usually 
does. The existence among us of a class 
of professional beggars necessarily tends 
to blunt our sensibilities and to harden our 



A BLIND BEGGAR. 229 

hearts to the wants of the deserving poor. 
We do well to resist this hardening influ- 
ence, and to recall to our minds occasionally 
the sad fact that there are around us, al- 
ways, everywhere, those who, without any 
fault of theirs, without any fault at least 
that we are called to avenge, are suffering 
for the common necessaries of life, — food, 
clothing and shelter, — and who have no 
immediate means of obtaining these neces- 
saries but by soliciting charity. 

"To beg I am ashamed." Yet the alter- 
native often is to beg or to starve, and the 
pangs of hunger may bring even a proud 
and sensitive soul to the humiliation of 
beggary. There may possibly be some 
reader of these lines, who, in childhood, 
through the improvidence of parents, or 
through other causes beyond his control, 
has been early called to look extreme pov- 
erty in the face, and has known by actual 
experience what it is to want for bread ! 
But even without this sorrowful experience, 
if we will occasionally give the matter a 
little sober thought, we may see sufficiently 
what a sad lot it is to be a beggar, to be 
obliged by actual want to ask for alms, or 



23O A BLIND BEGGAR. 

even to receive it. But, to be a blind beggar ! 
Blindness itself would seem to be calamity 
enough ; but blindness coupled with abject 
poverty, — what words can express the 
sorrowfulness of the condition? 

Such a pitiable object sat by the way-side, 
as Jesus came out from Jericho on his final 
journey to Jerusalem. Unlike any of his 
previous travels, the journey of Jesus on this 
occasion was a sort of triumphal progress, 
to be crowned at its close with enthusiastic 
hosannas. The continued succession of 
miracles had wrought in the minds of those 
attendant upon his ministry the growing con- 
viction which had just found incidental ex- 
pression in the petition of Salome and her 
sons ; namely, that he was about to enter 
upon his kingdom and glory. The vague 
hints about that mysterious baptism of blood 
through which he was to pass to his reward 
only increased the reverential and affec- 
tionate awe with which he began to be 
regarded. As he came out from Jericho, 
therefore, a throng of admiring disciples 
attended his progress, and they were much 
displeased with the rude noise of this clamor- 
ous beggar, telling him to K hold his peace." 



A BLIND BEGGAR. 231 

But, urged by the dreadful necessities of his 
case, and emboldened by what he had heard 
of the kindness of heart of this mysterious 
healer of diseases, the blind beggar was only 
the louder and more persistent in his cries, 
until at last they reached the ears of Jesus. 
It was not an alms that Bartimeus asked : 
that could be had of any stranger. When 
summoned to the presence of Jesus, and 
asked the object of his suit, the beggar with 
passionate fervor exclaims, "Lord, that I 
might receive my sight!" It was the cry 
of faith, as well as of importunate desire. 
The form of his address shows this. It was, 
throughout, "Jesus, thou son of David!" 
"Jesus, thou son of David!" and our Lord 
expressly says to him, w Thy faith hath saved 
thee." Some who were healed by Jesus be- 
lieved merely in his power to heal. But 
Bartimeus evidently was one who, from what 
he had heard of Jesus, recognized in him 
the expected Messiah. His faith was one 
that not only secured for him the temporal 
benefit, but forthwith made him a disciple 
and follower of the Saviour. w Immediately 
he received his sight, and followed Jesus in 
the way." 



232 A BLIND BEGGAR. 

The lessons to be derived from this beau- 
tiful narrative are many and obvious. It 
will be sufficient for my present purpose to 
enumerate a few of them. 

1. Let us imitate in our measure the ex- 
ample of the Master in regard to way-side 
beggars. Professional beggary nowhere 
flourishes as it does in the East, and the 
throng about Jesus doubtless had ample 
reasons for thinking that this noisy fellow 
ought to be silenced. Yet we see they 
were mistaken. His was a case of real 
and undeserved suffering. It may be so in 
some of the cases which we pass contempt- 
uously by in our daily walks. We have not 
the supernatural knowledge of Jesus, ena- 
bling us to know, as he did, by unerring 
intuition, whether a claimant for alms is a 
deserving man or an impostor. But by in- 
quiry and examination we may ascertain the 
fact with a reasonable certainty, and we owe 
it to our humanity and to our religion to fol- 
low Jesus in this, and not to shut our ears 
always to the cry of distress because it comes 
from a way-side beggar. 

2. Let us imitate the example of Bar- 
timeus in seeking from Jesus the blessings 



A BLIND BEGGAR. 233 

which we need for our own souls. We, too, 
are poor and blind. Our wants are vastly 
greater and more pressing than were the 
temporal wants of that poor blind man of 
Jericho. Let us not be withheld from seek- 
ing relief by any undue fear of breaking in 
upon conventional propriety. Bartimeus did 
not stop to ask whether his tattered garments 
were fit to be seen amid the goodly com- 
pany who were thronging about Jesus, or 
whether his clamorous outcries would not 
interrupt the conversation. His was an ur- 
gent case. Jesus might never again be 
within the reach of his voice. It was now 
or never with the man. It is the case of 
every one that is truly awakened to the con- 
dition of his soul as a sinner against God. 
There are seasons when Jesus is near. He 
is passing by, and multitudes throng about 
him. Let us not fear of offending him by 
our importunity. Let us press into his pres- 
ence, as if life or death depended upon the 
issue. The more our fear or our shame 
tells us to hold our peace, the more let our 
cry be, "Jesus, thou son of David, have 
mercy on me ! " The kingdom of heaven 
suffereth violence, and the violent take it 



234 A BLIND BEGGAR. 

by force. There is something of this soul- 
agony, this strong crying and wrestling, this 
resolute, persistent importunity, that will take 
no denial, in the experience of almost every 
Christian. 

3. For nothing should we cry more un- 
ceasingly, more importunately, than for 
light. "Lord, that I might receive my 
sight!" expresses a want as common as the 
prayer for daily bread. Above all do they 
need to utter this petition who, as parents 
or as teachers, are responsible for the guid- 
ance of others. For if the blind lead the 
blind, both shall fall into the ditch. If we 
would either follow Jesus in the way, or help 
others to do it, we need from him the gift of 
sight as much as did that blind beggar of 
Jericho. 




XL. 

ZACCHEISM. 

(Luke xix. i-io.) 

A S the Pharisees of the Gospels give us 
•^ ■*■ a certain type of religiousness, which 
has never been wanting in the church, so 
Zaccheus, the rich penitent of Jericho, has 
in all ages had his representatives. Zac- 
cheism is a type of Christianity that well 
deserves study. Let us dwell for a moment 
upon some of its more obvious features. 

i. Zaccheus had been a sinner. By this 
is meant, not that he was a sinner in the 
general sense, as all men are sinners, but 
that he belonged to a class whose business 
or profession was a sinful one. The busi- 
ness of the "publican" may not have been, 
in itself and necessarily, sinful; it was 
indeed possible for a man to discharge its 
duties without cheating or extortion. But in 



236 ZACCHEISM. 

the main, and as a class, the publicans of 
that day were rightly held in the same esti- 
mation in which we now hold gamblers and 
rum-sellers, — their business was one that 
was profitable just in proportion to its im- 
morality. As Zaccheus had become wealthy 
by it, the presumption is, and indeed he 
virtually acknowledges, that he had com- 
mitted the usual sins of his class : he had 
been guilty of rapacity and extortion. 

It is the glory of Christianity, that it does 
not close the door upon any one because of 
his past transgressions : its greatest achieve- 
ments have been in the conversion of men 
who had been notorious as wrong-doers, — 
in changing Saul the persecutor into Paul 
the chiefest of the apostles ; in making of a 
dissolute Bedfordshire tinker the author of 
w Pilgrim's Progress." There are at this mo- 
ment thousands of men and women, doing 
nobly for the upbuilding of Christ's king- 
dom, shining lights in the church, whose 
original career, equally with that of Zacche-? 
us, proves that Christ came, not to call the 
righteous, but to seek and save that which 
was lost. Ministers, Sunday-school teach- 
ers, and others who are seeking to lead men 



ZACCHEISM. 237 

to Christ, are not authorized to turn away 
from any one, or regard him as hopeless, 
because his past life has been chargeable 
with irregularity and excess. If such a one 
is now putting himself in the way of good 
influences, even though his motive is no bet- 
ter than that of Zaccheus, though he has 
come out from mere curiosity to see what is 
going on, let us imitate the Master, and give 
the stranger a hearty welcome to our reli- 
gious services. 

2. Zaccheus was in downright earnest. 
Having been seized with the desire to see 
Jesus, he seems to have been as resolute 
about it as he had ever been in money-get- 
ting. His diminutive stature evidently sub- 
jected him to ridicule. Especially w r hen, to 
secure his object, he climbed up into a tree, 
he must have been exposed to the jeers of 
the crowd. These rude burghers, many of 
whom doubtless had suffered from his ex- 
actions, and with whom he was already an 
object of dislike, had now a fine opportunity 
of venting their ill-will by laughing at the 
ridiculous figure he made, thus perched up 
in a tree. But neither the ridiculousness 
nor the inconvenience of the position deter- 



238 ZACCHEISM. 

red him. Such is often the experience of 
those who, before conversion, have been 
active in iniquity. They carry into religion 
the same energy and zeal which marked 
their worldly career ; they press into the 
kingdom with all their might. 

3. Zaccheus was prompt to make repa- 
ration for his past evil deeds. He proffers 
at once to give up one-half his fortune for 
benevolent purposes, and in any cases in 
which he had taken wrongfully what was 
not due, to restore fourfold. There is noth- 
ing of the Pharisee in this ; it is not a bribe 
offered to propitiate the good-will of Heaven. 
It is a mere expression of joy and gladness 
of heart on having Jesus in his house. 
When the Pharisee gave a tenth of all that 
he possessed, it was in a spirit of haughty 
self-righteousness and pride. The feeling 
of his heart was, I am doing all that God 
requires of me, and I have a right to the 
kingdom of heaven, because of my good 
deeds. Zaccheus, on the contrary, seems 
to have been overwhelmed with a sense of 
his own un worthiness, and of the great 
favor shown him, and in the fulness of his 
heart he is willing to make almost any sac- 



ZACCHEISM. 239 

rifice for the honor of his Lord. How true 
this is to Christian experience in all ages. 
Nothing opens the purse-strings like a gen- 
uine love of Jesus in the soul. The way to 
increase the volume of that stream of benev- 
olence by which the operations of the church 
are to be carried forward is, not by begging 
and importunity and wearisome appeals, but 
by warming the hearts of God's people with 
the love of Jesus. A millionnaire who is made 
to feel that "this day is salvation come to 
this house," will not wait for the "annual 
collection," or for the piteous story of some 
returned missionary, before bestowing of his 
abundance for the replenishing of the Lord's 
treasury. There are single churches in New 
York city, in which there is wealth enough 
in the membership to enable them to quad- 
ruple the entire missionary contributions of 
the Protestant churches of the United States, 
without coming up to the standard of liber- 
ality voluntarily proffered by this repentant 
publican of Jericho. 



tel 



^S^fes 



XLI. 



IMPROVING OPPORTUNITIES. 



(Luke xix. 11-27.) 

r I ^HE truths which underlie the parables 
■*■ of our Lord, and which are tacitly as- 
sumed, rather than distinctly asserted, are 
sometimes such as almost to stagger belief. 
The parables of the Ten Pounds and the 
Ten Talents, for instance, have no perti- 
nence except on the assumption that there 
is really no such thing in human affairs as 
a right of property. The house which I 
have built and which I call mine, the money 
which I have received by inheritance, or 
earned by toil, the crops which I have raised 
by the labor of my hands, whatever I have 
and howsoever acquired, is mine only as 
money left on deposit, to be employed for 
the benefit of the depositor. God is the 
only absolute proprietor. All that we have, 



IMPROVING OPPORTUNITIES. 24I 

of whatever kind, and that we call ours, is 
his, by perfect, absolute right. We are 
stewards, not proprietors, and the property 
in our hands is to be used for the honor and 
emolument of the great Proprietor. We are 
fiscal agents, and the money left in our 
hands is not ours, but simply a deposit left 
in trust, to be kept at interest for the benefit 
of the Depositor. It is a hard doctrine for 
us to accept as literally true, and yet there 
is no force or meaning to the parables 
named, except on the assumption that this is 
the true relation of men to human affairs. 

Whatever I have, whatever I am, what- 
ever I can do, is God's, to be employed as 
he shall think best, and for his honor and 
glory. How the doctrine strikes at the root 
of selfishness, in all its forms ! How pro- 
digiously would the benevolent activities 
and the liberality of God's people be in- 
creased, could they fairly realize that, in 
whatever relates to the employment of 
money, talent, time, opportunity, or means 
of action of any kind, they are merely 
agents or stewards, not proprietors! It 
would stimulate us to still greater earnest- 
ness could we only believe and realize the 
16 



242 IMPROVING OPPORTUNITIES. 

princely scale on which every act of faith- 
ful stewardship will be rewarded. The 
agent who by good management and thrift 
increased his depositor's one pound to ten 
pounds, received as his reward, not some 
small percentage of the gain, but a princely 
gift, a hundred-fold greater than the whole 
investment. The whole ten pounds would 
not have so much as bought him one house. 
Yet he received as his reward the lordship 
of ten whole cities. We have only to call 
to mind the enormous revenues which the 
lordship of a subject city yielded in those 
days of the Roman dominion, to understand 
how strongly our Saviour would state the 
case. No language can well overstate, 
either the absoluteness of his proprietor- 
ship in all that we have, or the generosity 
with which he rewards fidelity in the use 
of that which he has committed to us. It is 
as if a collector of internal revenue, who 
should collect and v pay over according to 
law a thousand dollars, without defalcation, 
should receive for his honesty a salary of a 
million ! 

There is no difficulty in understanding 
what our Lord meant by the "pound" dis- 



IMPROVING OPPORTUNITIES. 243 

tributed severally among the servants. We 
all understand it to be the opportunities 
for usefulness which we may severally en- 
joy. These opportunities are, ordinarily, 
either the bestowal of our money, the devo- 
tion of our time, or the employment of our 
intellectual faculties. The millionnaire may 
not be a man of eloquence, able by winning 
words to bring erring men over to the paths 
of rectitude ; he may not be a man of leisure, 
with time to hunt up the poor, the abject, 
and the erring, and bring them by personal 
solicitation and influence into right ways of 
living : but he may use such means as he 
has ; he may give his thousands, or his hun- 
dreds of thousands. Others have no money 
to give, but they have abundance of leisure, 
or, by natural talents and education, they 
are endowed with the gift of persuasion. 
Every one has his "pound" in some shape, 
and woe be to him if he uses not the deposit to 
the advantage and honor of the Proprietor ! 

What is my pound ? What opportunity 
has God given me for doing him service? 
This should be the serious inquiry of every 
reader. For, observe, it is not the sin of 
misuse, which is here condemned, but mere- 



244 IMPROVING OPPORTUNITIES. 

ly that of neglect, — failing to use to good 
purpose the means at our disposal. To use 
my talents or my time or my money in the 
perversion and the positive ruin of others, is, 
of course, an aggravated crime. But I shall 
not escape the displeasure of the Master by 
merely living a negative life : positive good 
is required at our hands. The unfaithful 
servant was condemned, not for stealing the 
pound or misappropriating it, but simply 
for carefully laying it away unused. In 
view of this, how terrible will be the account 
of many of us, who are living at our ease in 
God's vineyard. What would be our an- 
swers to questions such as these : Is there 
any part of my worldly estate which I do 
not need, and which I might use advanta- 
geously in the spread of the gospel? Have I 
any time unoccupied by the necessities of 
business, when I might be doing something 
for the cause of Christ? Have I any talent 
for business, any gift of speaking or writing, 
any pleasantness of personal address, any 
persuasiveness of manner, which might be 
used in winning souls, but which is now 
either unused, or used only for selfish and 
worldly purposes? Do I every day put 



IMPROVING OPPORTUNITIES. 245 

forth a positive, conscious effort for the 
awakening and conversion of some sinner? 
Am I habitually watching, planning, schem- 
ing, toiling for the good of others, as I am 
for my own selfish ends? What am I doing 
with my Lord's deposit? Am I employing it 
actively and energetically in his service ; or 
am I folding it safely away in a napkin? 

The late munificence of a banker-prince 
has filled two continents with admiration. 
His example is the more to be admired as 
he does not seem to have been actuated by 
the ordinary motives of ostentation, but by 
a proper sense of stewardship in regard to 
his great possessions. But it is not necessary 
to be a Peabody, in order to fulfil the spirit 
of this parable. Many a poor widow with 
only two mites at her disposal, many a hum- 
ble Sunday-school teacher, with nothing but 
love and labor to give, shall, equally with 
the giver of millions, receive the welcome of 
him who in the service of his lord turned the 
one pound to ten pounds, and was advanced 
in the kingdom to be ruler over ten cities. 



XLII. 



JESUS AS KING. 



(Matthew xxi. i-ii.) 

^ I ^HE Jews, in their expectations of a com- 
•*" ing Messiah, thought of him almost 
entirely as a King. Lordship and dominion 
were the ideas which filled the Jewish mind 
whenever they thought of the coming de- 
liverer. This is evident from the whole 
gospel narrative. Quite the opposite ten- 
dency exists in the Christian mind now. 
We now think of Christ more in his priestly 
character, as a sacrifice for our sins, as hav- 
ing made propitiation for us, as the Saviour. 
This thought tinctures involuntarily our 
prayers, which are chiefly supplications, 
entreaties, beseechings, petitions, to the for- 
getfulness, almost to the exclusion, of praise, 
adoration, and worship. It is well, there- 
fore, at times, to recall the truth that Christ 



JESUS AS KING. 247 

is a great King, to be praised and wor- 
shipped, and that our prayers should have 
reference to his glory, as well as to our 
wants. Indeed, in the model of prayer 
which he has himself given us, our wants 
are not so much as named until the prayer 
is half ended. We are to pray for the honor- 
ing of his name, for the coming of his king- 
dom, for the complete fulfilment of his will, 
in earth and heaven, before even thinking 
of ourselves. 

Christ's final entry into Jerusalem may 
teach us the same lesson, and we may the 
more readily study with this view the circum- 
stances of that entry, because the whole 
narrative indicates that the transaction was 
of a symbolical character. It is expressly 
said, "All this was done, that it might be 
fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet." 
As the circumstances of the last supper sym- 
bolize and call to mind his priestly character 
and work, and point us to the Lamb of God 
that taketh away the sins of the world, so 
the incidents of his last entry into the holy 
city all point us to his kingly character and 
office. Contrary to his usual custom, which 
was to avoid observation, Jesus, on this oc- 



248 JESUS AS KING. 

casion, studiously prearranged all the cir- 
cumstances of his entry, so as to give it the 
greatest publicity and to make himself the 
central and most conspicuous figure in a 
triumphal procession. In all the successive 
stages of his journey, from Galilee up, he 
has been gathering a crowd. No attempts 
now, as on many occasions, to scatter them, 
or to escape from them. Heretofore, like 
the humblest of his followers, he has gone 
upon foot. Now, for the first time, he rides, 
as one claiming precedence and superiority ; 
he encourages and accepts the demonstra- 
tions of honor which are made by the admir- 
ing throng of disciples ; he allows them to 
lay their garments in the way, that the beast 
which carried his sacred person might not 
even touch the ground ; he takes the pre- 
caution, and indeed performed a miracle for 
the purpose, to secure for the occasion, as 
was the wont with royal personages, a beast 
on which no one else had ever ridden ; he 
takes measures to have his followers inside 
the city apprised of his approach, so that a 
crowd from within swelled the crowd that 
was entering from without ; he receives 
unrebuked the loud hosannas of the mul- 
titude. 



JESUS AS KING. 249 

Does all this predicted, prearranged pomp 
mean nothing? Was it a mere ordinary in- 
cident of Christ's life, like his going to Ca- 
pernaum, or Bethsaida, or into the parts of 
Dalmanutha? Does it not teach us, was it 
not meant to teach us, that he who thus 
w 7 ent about not knowing where to lay his 
head, who was finally put to death as a 
malefactor, yet claims to be, and is, a King? 
— and that we are not only to remember him 
gratefully as our atoning sacrifice, but to pay 
him adoring homage, to laud and honor him 
with hosannas? Have we no errand before 
him except to beg? Must self be foremost 
even in our devotions? Can we not some- 
times approach him simply to do him honor, 
as an expression of our love andadmiration, 
and without reference to our wants, or, if re- 
membered at all, with only a feeling that he 
will attend to them? 

What a sense of quietness and security it 
gives, to think of Christ in his Kingly char- 
acter? The Scriptures clearly declare it to 
be a part of the divine arrangement, that, 
until the final consummation of all things at 
the last judgment, all the affairs of this world 
are specially committed to the second person 



25O JESUS AS KING. 

of the Trinity. One who was among us as 
a man sits upon his throne as Mediator, to 
direct with supreme lordship and dominion 
whatever concerns man. His interest in 
human affairs is as intense and as real now 
as it was eighteen hundred years ago, when, 
amid these very hosannas that were coming 
into his ears, he wept tears of bitter anguish 
over the impending fate of Jerusalem. Not 
a human sorrow but reaches his heart, not a 
human want but is known to him. He who 
saw in the distant village the ass and its colt 
tied, ready for use, who saw the fish with 
the piece of coin in its mouth, that would 
come to Peter's hook, sees equally you and 
me, and can order all things, great and 
small, for the fulfilment of the desires of his 
mighty heart of love. How assuring to our 
faith to know that such a one reigns over us 
with absolute dominion, and that beneath 
his protection we are perfectly, endlessly 
secure ! 



$ 



XLIIL 



THE CHILDREN'S HOSANNAS. 



(Matthew xxi. 12-16.) 

r I ^HE scribes and Pharisees were eminent 
"*■ for their theological learning and their 
acquaintance with the Scriptures. Yet they 
failed entirely to see in Jesus the signs of 
the Messiah. On the other hand, these 
signs were so plain to the young children in 
the temple, that they broke out into open 
and loud hosannas. Are we to understand 
from this that children know more than 
those of mature years? — that in religious 
matters we are to accept the opinions and 
the judgment of the young, the immature, 
the uneducated, in preference to the judg- 
ment of those who are highly educated and 
who have spent a lifetime in biblical re- 
search ? 

Such an interpretation is to mistake alto- 



252 THE CHILDREN S HOSANNAS. 

gether the meaning of this memorable trans- 
action. The passage is to be explained in 
the same way as that other, in which our 
Lord says, "I thank thee, Father, because 
thou hast hid these things from the wise and 
prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." 
It was not the intention of our Saviour in 
these expressions to disparage wisdom and 
theological learning, or to set up young 
children with an inflated idea that they know 
more than their seniors. The true doctrine 
which we are to learn from the history is 
this : Pride and malignity blind men, so 
that they cannot rightly discern religious 
truth ; men who are under the influence of 
these or other evil passions, are thereby 
incapacitated from seeing clearly in spiritual 
matters. The human soul may be compared 
to a fountain ; while the waters are still and 
limpid, every object appears clearly and in 
its right proportions ; but let evil passions 
come in to stir up the mud and sediment, 
and every thing becomes at once distorted 
or obscured. In other words, the heart must 
be right, before we can see rightly in reli- 
gious matters. There are great fundamental 
truths of Christianity which the most subtle 



THE CHILDREN S HOSANNAS. 253 

theologian, the profoundest biblical scholar, 
may miss, if his heart is not right with God ; 
which the babe in the infant-school may see 
and accept, whose heart has been attuned 
thereto by the inworking of the Holy Spirit. 
A childlike and teachable disposition, a 
perfect willingness to take God at his word, 
either in regard to what we are to believe 
or what we are to do, is the indispensable 
condition to a proper acceptance and under- 
standing of the teachings of the gospel. 

This is no disparagement of age or learn- 
ing. Many of the greatest theologians that 
the church has ever known have had this 
very childlike disposition in the most emi- 
nent degree. What child in the infant- 
school ever showed greater simplicity of 
heart than Doctor Archibald Alexander, of 
Princeton, or the venerable Bishop White, 
of Philadelphia? The scribes and Phari- 
sees of our Lord's day were men of great 
acumen and subtlety, and they had pro- 
found knowledge of the Scriptures : but 
they were to the last degree proud and 
arrogant ; they were full of bitterness and 
self-conceit ; and these bad passions blinded 
them, so that they could not see the signs 



254 THE CHILDREN S HOSANNAS. 

of the promised Messiah which appeared 
in Jesus of Nazareth, though these signs 
were so plain and palpable that even the 
unlearned and the common people recog- 
nized them, and though in this case, in the 
temple, the very children were moved to 
give him hosannas, in public recognition of 
his claims. 

The interpretation of this passage should 
not be pressed, as it sometimes is, so as to 
inflate children with conceit, and make 
them think that they know more than 
their elders. On the other hand, however, 
the passage does give a most blessed and 
comforting assurance that children of very 
tender years, and others of the most limited 
knowledge and education, may yet truly 
receive and honor Christ. It has a double 
lesson. Let the babes and sucklings learn 
to shout hosannas ; let the wise and pru- 
dent learn to become as babes and sucklings. 



XLIV. 



NOTHING BUT LEAVES. 



(Matthew xxi. 17-22.) 

r I ^HE curse of the barren fig-tree requires 
"*• no labored exegesis. The most un- 
learned reader understands it. In the Chris- 
tian life, leaves are but the profession and 
the promise of good. Real goodness of 
heart and life is the ripened fruit. 

We are all quick enough to see how this 
applied to the multitudes who frequented 
our Saviour's preaching, and appeared for a 
time full of zeal for his cause, who were 
ready to spread their garments- in the way 
before him, and to shout hosannas at his 
approach, though nothing more is heard of 
them w T hen the day of trial came. We are 
quick enough to admit, in the abstract, the 
general principle, that profession without 
practice, promise without fulfilment, show 



256 NOTHING BUT LEAVES. 

without substance, is but leaves without fruit. 
The difficulty lies in the practical application. 
How different indeed would be the Lord's 
garden, if every tree in it which puts forth 
abundant leaves and blossoms were to yield 
in equal measure the ripened fruit ! 

Let us consider for a moment a single 
example, — one with which my readers are 
thoroughly familiar. 

A more promising tree is not to be seen 
in all the garden of the Lord, one more lux- 
uriant in leaves and blossoms, than the Sab- 
bath school. I should be doing a grievous 
wrong, were I to say, or to intimate, that it 
is not yielding precious fruit. But is the 
fruit at all commensurate with the promise? 
Is the Sabbath school accomplishing one- 
half, or one-tenth, of what its appearance 
and its promises would lead a casual ob- 
server to expect? 

There are in the United States not less 
than four hundred thousand Sabbath-school 
teachers, engaged in the work of preaching 
Christ to not less than four million children. 
Such a prodigious force ought to show re- 
sults that would revolutionize society. Were 
the fruit in proportion to the foliage, the 



NOTHING BUT LEAVES. 257 

annual conversions would be numbered by- 
hundreds of thousands. 

The Sabbath school is known as the Bible 
school. The Word of God is the text-book, 
the doctrines and precepts of the gospel are 
the subject of study. If on the occasion of 
a Sabbath-school anniversary we were to 
institute a bona Jide examination of the 
classes, upon the Bible knowledge which 
they had acquired during the previous year, 
would the result be at all proportionate to 
the promise? Are our children as familiar 
with the contents of their Bible as they are 
with their geography, their grammar, or 
their arithmetic? Are there not, in every 
Sabbath school, classes of bright, intelli- 
gent children, who make a fine show in 
the pleasant picture that greets the eye of the 
superintendent, who figure largely in the 
roll-book, but who are making no definite, 
systematic progress in Bible knowledge, as 
they do in their other branches of learning ! 

If a child goes to a secular school for 
four or five years, the parents expect him 
to make certain definite acquisitions. He 
finishes study after study in regular order ; 
he goes from arithmetic to algebra, fronr 
17 



258 NOTHING BUT LEAVES. 

geography to history, from grammar to 
rhetoric ; he masters point after point, and 
builds up gradually a system of definite, 
well-digested, available knowledge. Is the 
same true of the child who has been an 
equal length of time in the Sabbath school? 
What are the actual attainments in Bible 
knowledge, made by the majority of Sab- 
bath scholars, after an attendance of five 
years? Of course the same amount of at- 
tainment is not to be expected of the Sab- 
bath schools as of other schools, for the 
obvious reason that it is held but one day 
in the week, while the other is held five 
days. But, on the other hand, it should be 
remembered that in the one school the child 
has but a single study, while in the other it 
has at the same time five or six different 
studies ; in the one school there is a teacher 
for every six or seven scholars, giving the 
greatest possible opportunity for individualiz- 
ing instruction, w T hile in the other the teacher 
has large classes of thirty or forty, some- 
times seventy or eighty. 

I do not wish to be censorious, or to speak 
words of discouragement ; but this beau- 
tiful green tree of ours is making a great 



NOTHING BUT LEAVES. 259 

show in the land ; it is gorgeous with leaves 
and blossoms, — a fairer sight nowhere meets 
the eye in all this wide world. It behooves 
us, then, to ponder the question, whether 
our Lord, when he comes, shall find fruit 
thereon, or only leaves ; it behooves the 
church to see that this institution, in which 
so much of its own life-blood flows, is not a 
mere young people's meeting, but what its 
name imports, a school, — a place for 
substantial and orderly study and advance- 
ment in Bible knowledge. 

What are some of the things which chil- 
dren, who grow up in the Sabbath school, 
ought to know, as a part of the fruit of 
their Sabbath-school teaching ? — not to have 
vague ideas about them, but to know them, 
solidly and firmly, as they know the rules 
of grammar and arithmetic? Let me enu- 
merate some of these things, taking those 
only which are plain and tangible, and 
about which there is the same feasibility 
of definite knowledge that there is about 
the Multiplication Table. 

1. First, there are certain parts of Scrip- 
ture which every child ought to know with 
entire verbal -accuracy, and with such firm- 



260 NOTHING BUT LEAVES. 

ness of knowledge that they will never de- 
part from the memory. Among these may 
be named the Ten Commandments ; the 
Lord's Prayer ; the Sermon on the Mount ; 
the Parables, and most of the other sayings 
of our Lord ; the fifty-third chapter of 
Isaiah ; a considerable number of the Psalms, 
such as the twenty -third, the fifty-first, the 
ninetieth, and so on ; and selected passages 
from all parts of the Bible containing pre- 
cious truths suited to feed and nurture the 
soul. A part of the Scriptures entirely too 
much neglected in our Bible teaching is the 
book of Proverbs. Of what incalculable 
benefit would it be if every child could have 
at his tongue's end one hundred even of 
these priceless, practical directories, such as 
? A soft answer turneth away wrath ; " "A 
good name is rather to be chosen than great 
riches?" 

The portions of Scripture here designated 
do not amount in the aggregate to more than 
our children have, to commit to memory in 
every one of the many studies which they 
pursue at school ; they do not include any 
thing probably which any parent, minister, 
or superintendent would wish, theoretical!}', 



NOTHING BUT LEAVES. 26l 

to be left out from a child's curriculum of 
religious study. How much of this list do 
our children in Sabbath school actually 
learn? What fruit in this respect is our 
tree bearing? Let the reader try the first 
class of Sabbath-school children he meets, 
and see what proportion of them can recite, 
without mistake, even the first item in our 
list, the Ten Commandments. 

2. It would be folly to undertake to com- 
mit to memory the narrative portions of 
Scripture. Yet our children should have a 
familiar acquaintance with the historical facts 
narrated in the Bible. The Bible history 
should be as familiar to them as the best- 
known portions of the history of their own 
country. In this general knowledge of the 
contents of the Bible, unless the experience 
of the writer has been exceptionally unfor- 
tunate, the young people of our present gen- 
eration are sadly deficient. In this connec- 
tion, too, it may be remarked that every 
child ought to know the names and the 
arrangement of the several books of the 
Bible, so as to be able to use it readily as a 
book of reference, — so as not to look for 



262 NOTHING BUT LEAVES. 

Galatians in the Old Testament, or Chron- 
icles in the New, as one may see done any- 
day that he will try the experiment. 

3. Every church has its catechism, or 
brief formula of Christian doctrine, as held 
in that church, and the church and the 
parents who belong to it have a right to ex- 
pect of the school to which the religious 
training of their children is committed, that 
it shall teach them these formulas of doc- 
trine as faithfully and thoroughly as the 
secular school teaches them to learn the 
tables of weights and measures. 

4. The literature of the church has been 
enriched with many hundreds of precious 
hymns, some of which come as near to di- 
vine inspiration as any thing can be that is 
merely human. No words can exaggerate 
the value of these hymns, as a means of 
nurturing the Christian life in the soul, and 
no religious training is complete which does 
not secure, during the season of youth, the 
treasuring up of a goodly portion of these 
hymns in the memory. 

Under these four heads, thus hastily 
thrown together, may be seen some of the 



NOTHING BUT LEAVES. 



263 



fruits which we have a right to expect 
from this our wide-spreading tree. Are we 
realizing those fruits to the extent that we 
ought to realize them? Are we not resting 
content with a goodly show of leaves ? 




XLV. 

THE WICKED HUSBANDMEN. 
(Matthew xxi. 33-41.) 

npHE parable of the Wicked Husband- 
■*- men, more almost than any other of 
the parables of our Lord, had a special ap- 
plication. In this parable Jesus depicts the 
wickedness of the Jews in rejecting him, 
and the awful consequences of this rejec- 
tion upon their race and nation. This is the 
primary, specific teaching of the parable. 
God, for wise purposes of his own, had set 
apart one particular nation, and made it the 
depository and guardian of his revealed 
truth. The Jewish nation was his vineyard, 
hedged in by privileges and enriched with 
blessings beyond any other race or nation. 
But in course of time the Jews had come to 
consider these privileges and blessings, not 
in the light of a trust, to be held and used for 



THE WICKED HUSBANDMEN. 265 

the honor of the great Proprietor, but as 
being their own, by some inherent and ina- 
lienable right. They forgot that they were 
stewards, they imagined themselves propri- 
etors. Nay, when the Proprietor himself, 
in the person of his son and heir, came 
to claim his lawful rights, they conspired 
against him, with a view of making the 
vineyard their own. In taking the vineyard 
from these husbandmen and committing it 
to others, Christ teaches that after his death 
the peculiar church privileges in which the 
Jews gloried should be taken from them 
and given to the gentiles. How terribly to 
them, how gloriously to others, this threat- 
ening has been fulfilled, the whole history 
of the world since the death of Christ abun- 
dantly testifies. 

Though thus specific in its literal fulfil- 
ment and in its primary meaning, the para- 
ble has yet an underlying principle of uni- 
versal application. The religious privileges 
accorded to an}^ one are not his by inherent 
right, to be used for mere personal enjoy- 
ment, or that he may in any way lord it over 
God's heritage, but are a trust, to be used 
for the honor of the Proprietor. If we are 



266 THE WICKED HUSBANDMEN. 

in his vineyard at all, we are there, not as 
owners, but as husbandmen, to do work 
for him, and to find our chief enjoyment 
in yielding to him the fruits of our labors. 
Woe to the man whose religious privileges 
foster in him pride and self-conceit, or 
make him supercilious, arrogant, and ex- 
clusive ! Woe to the church whose arrange- 
ments or practices foster such a disposition 
in its members ! 

Fruit gathered in the Lord's vineyard is 
for his honor and glory, not for ours. The 
Jew of Christ's day was ready to compass 
sea and land in order to make one proselyte. 
But it was not to honor God that he felt this 
burning zeal : it was only to increase the 
glory of the Jewish name. We commit the 
same sin, when we strive to swell the ranks 
of our class, our school, or our sect, rather 
than to win souls for Christ. Human nature 
is weak at its best estate, and we do not 
cease to be human when we become Chris- 
tians. When we have labored and prayed 
for a man's conversion, and the means which 
we have used for his conversion prove effect- 
ual, and he becomes truly regenerate, and 
takes his stand as an earnest, working Chris- 



THE WICKED HUSBANDMEN. 267 

tian, it is no easy thing for us to see him go- 
ing off to some other fold ; we feel as if he 
were ours. Possibly we are incensed that 
the fruit of our labors should go to swell 
some one else's bin. Let us not forget that 
we are only husbandmen, and that the fruit 
of the vineyard belongs neither to us, nor to 
our fellow-laborers, but to the Lord of the 
vineyard. Let it be our ambition to win 
souls, not to win the credit of it. Let us 
feel that it is of infinitely more consequence 
to increase the number of Christians than 
to swell the ranks of Episcopalians, of Pres- 
byterians, of Methodists, or of Baptists. 
The inheritance is Christ's, not ours, and 
•so that He gets the honor and credit of 
men's salvation, we may well be content to 
stay in the background. 

The evil is a real, though a rather intan- 
gible one. There is a great deal of zeal in 
the world, and even of apparent self-denial, 
which on examination will prove to be only 
selfishness under some of its protean dis- 
guises. We work to build up our opinions, 
our sect, our party, our denomination. 
Even the Church of Christ is of little ac- 
count to us, except as it is our church. The 



268 THE WICKED HUSBANDMEN. 

very hardest thing we have to do in this life 
is to keep ourselves in our true position, as 
merely husbandmen and stewards ; to count 
self nothing, and Christ every thing ; to do 
with all our might whatsoever our hands 
find to do, and when at length the fruit of 
our labor is gathered, to count it simply as 
Christ's, — all Christ's. 




XLVI. 

GROUND TO POWDER. 

(Matthew xxi. 42-46.) 

/^\UR Lord illustrated his doctrines, some- 
^-^ times from the common objects and 
occurrences around him, as from the lilies 
of the field and the falling of the tower in 
Siloam, and sometimes from objects and in- 
cidents made memorable in the Old Testa- 
ment Scriptures. One peculiarly bold and 
striking figure used in the book of Daniel 
(ii. 31-45) is employed by our Lord to 
impress upon his hearers the awfulness of 
the danger of rejecting him. It is worth 
while, therefore, to look for a moment at 
the original figure, as used by Daniel, that 
we may gain thereby a more distinct im- 
pression of the truth set forth by Christ. 

The vision which appeared to Nebuchad- 
nezzar, and which Daniel described and in- 



270 GROUND TO POWDER. 

terpreted, was that of a great image, whose 
head was of fine gold, its breast and arms 
of silver, its belly and thighs of brass, its 
legs of iron, and its feet partly of iron and 
partly of clay. A huge stone, cut out of 
the mountain without hands, fell upon this 
image and broke it into pieces, crushing 
and disintegrating its several parts, until it 
^became like powder, or like the chaff of the 
summer threshing-floors. 

In our fields occasionally are to be seen 
enormous boulders, weighing sometimes 
hundreds of thousands of tons. If we could 
imagine one of these huge masses of rock, 
lifted by unseen power high into air, and 
then hurled down with violence upon a frail 
China vase standing out upon the open lawn, 
we would get some faint idea of that image 
of crushing power set before us by the an- 
cient prophet. Beneath the weight of that 
mysterious " stone cut out of the mountain, " 
the mightiest empires and monarchies — 
Babylonian, Assyrian, Grecian, and Roman 
— have been completely crumbled and 
disintegrated. Our Lord intimated to the 
Jews that a like fate awaited their common- 
wealth, on account of their sin in rejecting 



GROUND TO POWDER. 27 1 

him. How literally has this terrible predic- 
tion been fulfilled ! Of that compact little 
commonwealth, which had such a wondrous 
vitality, not a particle of organic life re- 
mains. The Jews survive, but the Jewish 
commonwealth is gone. Its members are 
scattered abroad over the face of the whole 
earth, like the sifting grains of sand which 
once composed a solid mass of granite. 

God has set up a kingdom in this world. 
In this kingdom, which is often compared 
to a temple, Jesus Christ is the chief corner- 
stone. Whatever human government, what- 
ever social system, whatever individual, 
opposes this divine kingdom, or rejects Christ 
its chief corner-stone, incurs an awful dan- 
ger. "On whomsoever it shall fall, it will 
grind him to powder." The fate which 
befell the Jewish commonwealth shall be- 
fall each man personally who rejects Christ. 
He shall be ground to powder beneath the 
crushing weight of God's righteous anger. 
The expression gives us a lively idea of the 
utter and hopeless ruin of those who oppose 
the gospel. 

How could it be otherwise? If there are 



272 GROUND TO POWDER. 

in the gospel the first elements of literal 
truth, if in sober verity God did truly be- 
come man, for the sake of raising men from 
their fallen condition, how terrible must be 
the fate of those who wilfully despise and 
reject so stupendous a gift ! How awful to 
provoke the anger of One who holds the 
universe in the hollow of his hand ! And 
how can he be otherwise than angry at 
those who reject a boon procured for them 
at such a price ? 

Ground to powder ! — not annihilated : 
that would be merciful in comparison ; but 
crushed, broken, reduced to the condition of 
inorganic matter — all our hopes, schemes, 
plans, purposes, frustrate and futile, like a 
piece of matter that has been pulverized, 
and that no longer has any coherence ; our 
wishes, desires, aspirations, affections borne 
down and bruised, till all elastic power has 
left them, and they float about aimless as 
the thistle-down driven by the wind ; our 
imagination, our reason, our power of think- 
ing, our lordly will, — nay, the soul itself, — 
our very being, laid upon the anvil and 
pounded, till it becomes as the small dust of 



GROUND TO POWDER. 273 

the balance, — worthless, hopeless, helpless, 
without end ! 

Mysterious words ! Lord, who kn'oweth 
the power of thine anger? Who willingly 
would incur so fearful a danger? 



18 




XLVIL 

THE TWO SIDES OF OUR LORD'S 
CHARACTER. 



(Luke xix. 41-48.) 

TF any one will read attentively the gospel 
A narrative, having his thoughts previously 
called to the subject, he can hardly fail to be 
struck with the sharp contrast between two 
opposite and almost irreconcilable features 
in our Lord's character. He is at one time 
all tenderness and compassion ; again, on 
the same page, he is a stern avenger, his 
actions studiously provoking opposition and 
anger, his words full of bitterness and harsh 
denunciation. 

A signal example of this peculiarity oc- 
curs in the record of his final entry into 
Jerusalem. (Luke xix. 41-48.) Amid the 
jubilation and the hosannas of that occasion, 
his thoughts looked forward to the approach- 



OUR LORDS CHARACTER. 275 

ing calamities which were soon to befall his 
unbelieving countrymen, and as he cast his 
eyes over the doomed city, he was so moved 
with compassion that he "wept." Not only 
he shed tears, but according to the true force 
of the original word, he "cried," — unman- 
ned, as it were, by the sorrow he felt for 
those who were about to reject him. Yet 
from this scene, which is so touching in its 
humanity, and which the commentators have 
apparently shrunk from expressing with 
literal accuracy, as though there were some- 
thing almost unmanly in the act of Jesus, — 
from this scene of almost incomprehensible 
tenderness, and before the tears are yet dry 
upon his cheeks, he proceeds at once to 
acts and words that savor of harshness and 
austerity, such as we might expect in John 
the Baptist, driving the offenders out of the 
temple by acts of violence, and following 
them with opprobrious epithets, overthrow- 
ing their tables, and openly calling them a 
set of thieves. 

Let us look at some other examples. The 
Sermon on the Mount opens with the Beati- 
tudes. No language can exceed the tender 
pathos, the gentle and touching humanity, 



276 THE TWO SIDES OF 

that breathes through those wonderful ut- 
terances. Yet other portions of that very 
discourse exhibit the author as the most 
exacting and severe of moralists, exceeding 
in his puritanism even the scribes and Phar- 
isees. It is said of him in another place, 
in illustration of his gentleness, that he will 
not quench the smoking flax or break the 
bruised reed, and in accordance with this he 
utters continually words of soothing and 
comfort that it seems impossible for the 
human heart to resist. "Come unto me, all 
ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will 
give you rest." "Let not your heart be 
troubled : ye believe in God, believe also in 
me,". The symbol by which he is constantly 
represented in the Scriptures is that of a 
lamb, the gentlest and most inoffensive of 
all animals. Yet this gentlest of human 
beings, in addressing a certain class of 
religionists, calls • them "a generation of 
vipers!" He exposes their hypocrisies 
and shams with unsparing severity, and he 
denounces them with oft-repeated woes, 
which it makes one shudder even to read. 
"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hyp- 
ocrites!" "Ye fools! ye blind guides! ye 



OUR LORDS CHARACTER. 277 

serpents ! ye generation of vipers ! how can 
ye escape the damnation of hell?" It is He, 
who speaks of that place of outer darkness, 
where there shall be weeping and gnashing 
of teeth, where the worm dieth not, and the 
fire is not quenched, — Fie, who hereafter 
shall be revealed from heaven with his 
mighty angels, in flaming fire, taking ven- 
geance on them that know not God, and that 
obey not the gospel. 

"The wrath of the Lamb!" It was no 
chance blunder that originated this seem- 
ingly self-contradictory phrase. No com- 
bination of words could so well express the 
two opposite sides of our Lord's character. 
He is most truly the Lamb of God. But he 
is also the Lion of the tribe of Judah. He 
is the Saviour of the world. But he is also 
to be its final Judge. The same lips which 
now utter the words of entreaty, which say 
"Come unto me, ye that labor and are 
heavy laden ; take my yoke upon you and 
learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of 
heart," shall then say, " Depart, ye cursed, 
into everlasting fire!" He who bore the 
penalty of the broken law for such as be- 
lieve on him, will also himself execute its 



278 our lord's character. 

penalty on such as are rebellious and dis- 
obedient. He is King as well as Priest. 
He executes vengeance, as well as dispenses 
mercy. 

Many persons enjoy a fancied security, 
because they have a vague impression that 
Jesus is all compassion, and that somehow 
they shall escape at last, although they neg- 
lect all the conditions upon which salvation 
is promised. If such would but consider 
this double aspect of our Lord's character, 
it may open their eyes in time to the awful 
mistake which they are making ! 




XL VIII. 



THE TWO SERMONS. 



(Matthew xxiii. 13-24.) 

A S our Lord began his public ministry, 
•*—*■ so he closed it, with a formal, extended 
discourse, or sermon. The first of these is 
familiarly known as the Sermon on the 
Mount. The other has received no such 
familiar designation, but it stands out with 
equal prominence in the gospel narrative. 
It is the discourse in which (Matthew xxiiL) 
Jesus summed up his full and final judg- 
ment of the religious leaders of his country- 
men. I had occasion in the previous chapter 
to remark upon the twofold character of 
Christ, as being in one aspect all that is 
mild and gentle, in another all that is most 
dreadful in judicial severity. The dis- 
courses now referred to bring out these two 
features of his character in striking contrast, 



28o THE TWO SERMONS. 

and at the same time in equally striking 
correlation. 

The Sermon on the Mount is remarka- 
ble, not only for the wonderful revelation of 
universal truths which underlie its con- 
crete, special teachings, but for that spirit 
of graciousness which pervades its whole 
structure and essence. It is felt to be the 
appropriate introduction to a system which 
is, like its author, full of grace and truth: 
it breathes of meekness, humility, peace, 
and love. That other discourse, on the con- 
trary, is the language of a stern, inexorable 
censor, breathing out only rebuke, condem- 
nation, and woe. Our Lord had met the 
scribes and Pharisees from point to point, 
during the three years of his ministry, ex- 
posing their sophistries and their malice, 
first on one subject and then on another; 
but now, as if by way of uttering in one 
connected array a full and sweeping con- 
demnation of their whole system and spirit, 
he arraigns and judges them, in presence of 
the people, in this memorable, and in some 
respects awful, discourse. 

As the first discourse opens with a suc- 
cession of Beatitudes, so the second opens 



THE TWO SERMONS. 28l 

with a succession of Woes. The Beatitudes 
are eight in number, followed by a ninth, 
which is a sort of summary of the preceding. 
So the Woes are eight. But here the par- 
allel ends. Instead of a ninth woe, our 
Saviour, in view of the impending calami- 
ties, breaks out into that piteous lamentation 
over the doomed city and people. 

In this remarkable parallelism between 
the two discourses, we may even find points 
of analogy in the subject-matter of the 
several woes and blessings. The woe upon 
those who devour widows' houses ; who, 
under a pretext of pious uses, inveigle weak- 
minded people out of their money, and so 
make a gain of godliness, — brings with it, 
almost in its very terms, a reminder of the 
blessing pronounced upon those who are 
poor in spirit. The woe upon those who 
compass sea and land to make one prose- 
lyte ; those religious zealots who scruple 
not at violence, persecution, and blood even, 
in their ambition to secure converts, — sets 
one by contrast to thinking of the meek who 
shall inherit the earth. The woe upon those 
who not only do not enter the kingdom them- 
selves, but who shut the door against those 



282 THE TWO SERMONS. 

that are entering; whose haughty arro- 
gance not only keeps them from admitting 
the claims of Christ, but leads them to dis- 
parage him in the eyes of the people, — 
shows a contrast to the spirit and temper of 
those who mourn for sin and are comforted. 
The woe upon those who quibble about the 
difference between the temple and the gold 
of the temple, the altar and the gift which 
is upon it; those subtle casuists who by 
Jesuitical distinctions pervert the eternal 
principles of truth and right, — reminds us 
by contrast of those who in all singleness of 
purpose hunger and thirst after righteous- 
ness. The woe upon those who tithe mint, 
anise, and cummin, and omit the weightier 
matters, judgment, mercy, and faith ; who 
are scrupulously exact in the performance 
of minor and non-essential religious duties, 
while in temper and spirit they are towards 
others harsh, cruel, and faithless, — almost 
forces us to think of the blessing pronounced 
upon the merciful. The cleansing of the 
outside of the cup and platter, while within 
are all sorts of uncleanliness and excess, re- 
calls that purity of heart on which the early 
benediction fell. The blessing upon those 



THE TWO SERMONS. 283 

who are persecuted for righteousness sake 
brings to mind the curse upon those who 
were persecutors of Christ and his disciples. 
It seems impossible, indeed, not to notice 
the curious, almost startling, correlation be- 
tween this Ebal and Gerizim of the New 
Testament, — this mount of cursing and 
mount of blessing, — this sermon of woes 
and sermon of beatitudes, — the stern, ju- 
dicial character of our Lord's last public 
discourse, and the mild and gracious char- 
acter of that with which his public ministry 
opened. These two aspects of his character 
come occasionally into view all through the 
gospel record, but nowhere do they stand 
out in such bold relief as in these two con- 
trasted discourses. The contemplation of 
them in this connected form helps us to 
understand better some of those isolated 
passages in which only one side of his 
character is brought into view. He is a 
lamb, — the most inoffensive and helpless 
of all animals; he is a lion, — the king of 
beasts, whose roar sends terror into the 
hearts of his enemies. He is the Saviour, 
— full of gentleness and compassion, who 
will not break the bruised reed, or quench 



284 THE TWO SERMONS. 

the smoking flax, one to whom children's 
hearts go out with instinctive and unhesitat- 
ing confidence ; he is the Judge of quick 
and dead. He redeems from the curse of 
the law all those who put their trust in him ; 
he executes the law on those who trust 
him not. 

It is shocking to witness the flippant 
familiarity with which some professedly 
pious people address the Lord Jesus Christ. 
The best corrective of this tendency is to 
study his character in all the rounded ful- 
ness of its many-sided perfection. One who 
has attained this completed view cannot fail, 
on the one hand to approach him with affec- 
tionate, childlike tenderness, while on the 
other he will ever look up with devout and 
reverential awe. 



XLIX. 

THE TWO LOVES. 

(Matthew xxii. 34-40.) 

T OVE is the fulfilling of the law. So 
-"■— ' say the Scriptures, and it needs but a 
moment's reflection to convince us that it 
must be so. All requirements of law may 
be reduced to two heads, — good which we 
are commanded to do, and evil which we 
are prohibited from doing. If we love any 
one, that love will of itself lead us to do him 
all the good in our power, and negatively 
not to do him knowingly any harm. Love, 
then, is necessarily the fulfilling of the law, 
because all its motions are directly in the 
line which the law requires. A soul filled 
with love obeys the law, on the same prin- 
ciple that a piece of matter possessed of 
gravitation obeys the laws of gravitation. 
This love is twofold, — love to God and 



286 THE TWO LOVES. 

love to man. We are not required to love 
the angels ; we may have for them a feel- 
ing of admiration, for the shining qualities 
which they possess, and for the glorious 
offices which they perform ; but, in this 
life at least, we owe them no duty, and we 
are not required to hold them in affection. 
Nor are we required to love the inferior ani- 
mals, though we should treat them with 
kindness, and we often do regard them with 
affection. But in respect to God and our 
fellow-men, the duty is imperative and uni- 
versal. We must love the Lord our God 
with supreme affection ; we must love our 
fellow-men as we love ourselves. 

There is no antagonism between these 
two loves ; on the contrary, there is the closest 
correlation and interdependence. Such love 
to man as the Scriptures require, is never 
found, except in a soul that loves God 
supremely, and there is no valid evidence 
of love to God which does not show itself 
in love to man. If one love not his brother, 
whom he hath seen, how can he love God, 
whom he has not seen ? 

Supreme love to God springs from the 
view of his supreme excellence and glory. 



THE TWO LOVES. 287 

The heart goes out to him as it can go out 
to no other object, because no other object 
so fills and satisfies our sense of what is ex- 
cellent and glorious. There is of necessity 
something ecstatic and ravishing in such an 
exercise of the soul. It necessarily elevates 
and transports. It is impossible to love su- 
premely, with all the heart, soul, mind, and 
strength without a feeling of ecstasy ; and 
to stigmatize such feelings as fanaticism, is 
to ignore or disparage the legitimate work- 
ings of the human soul in the highest exer- 
cise of its rational powers. Strong emotion, 
in view of God's infinite perfections, is as 
natural as the evolution of heat under the 
direct rays of the sun. Many of the Psalms 
were written at a white heat, and, so under- 
stood, nothing can exceed the naturalness 
even of their most extravagant expres- 
sions. 

But just here is a source of mistake. 
There may be rapture where there is no 
religion ; there may be violent mental ex- 
citement, amounting to ecstasy, — and these 
feelings may be mixed up in some way with 
the thought of God and of divine things, and 
yet they may not be an expression of true 



288 THE TWO LOVES. 

love. The ecstasy of true religion has an 
unerring test; it springs not from love to 
God, unless it leads us to love man. That 
fervor of devotion is to be suspected, which 
does not strew its pathway with deeds of 
beneficence. The man who is carried away 
with pious fervor in his closet, and then goes 
out to drive a hard bargain with a customer, 
or to listen coldly to a tale of suffering, needs 
to consider well the nature of his religious 
experiences. The man who, in prayer- 
meeting, with melting tones appropriates 
the penitential utterances of David or of 
Paul, an4 then doles out some miserable 
pittance whenever his Lord's cause needs 
help, is not necessarily a hypocrite, for hy- 
pocrisy implies conscious and intentional 
imposition : but, if not a hypocrite, he is at 
best a miserable self-deceiver. That man's 
religion is vain. 

True, we are not justified by our works ; 
but neither are we justified without works. 
Good works, deeds of love and kindness, 
not ecstatic feelings, are the only proofs on 
which we can rely, in the court of God or 
man, or of our own conscience, that we 
have true love to God. 



THE OUTSIDE OF THE CUP AND 
OF THE PLATTER. 

(Matthew xxiii. 25-28.) 

/CHRISTIANITY is distinguished as be- 
^^ ing a religion of the heart. Our Lord 
struck the key-note to the system in his first 
public discourse, the Sermon on the Mount. 
Nothing can exceed the searching tests 
which he there applies to whatever claims 
to be either moral or religious. To be, not to 
seem, is the inexorable demand from every 
disciple. This idea — so clearly enunciated 
and so fully illustrated in his first discourse — 
pervades and seasons all his teaching, down 
to that last of all his public discourses, in 
which he solemnly denounces the Scribes 
and Pharisees for cleansing the outside of 
the cup and of the platter, while within they 
are full of extortion and excess. 
19 



29O THE OUTSIDE OF THE 

This, then, may be considered as the dis- 
tinguishing character of his religion. It is 
something which has its seat in the heart, 
— which begins from within and works out- 
wardly into the life. t Just so far as any sys- 
tem begins with the outward, with forms 
and ceremonies and shows, and from them 
works inwardly, just so far is it alien to 
Christianity. Our Lord does not discard 
outward morality; he does not denounce 
external decorum in the forms and observ- 
ances of religion. What he warns us 
against is the resting upon these as suffi- 
cient, or the beginning with these as the 
starting-point. If we would have the con- 
duct right, make the heart right ; if we 
would have the fruit good, make the tree 
good, — no amount of trimming and pruning 
and external culture will produce grapes 
from a thorn-bush ; if we want grapes, we 
must plant a vine ; if we want figs, we 
must plant a fig-tree ; if we want to make 
a man moral, temperate, honest, we must 
seek first his conversion, — the renewing of 
his heart by the Holy Spirit ; external con- 
formity to whatsoever is pure and lovely 
and of good report will follow as a matter of 
course. 



CUP AND OF THE PLATTER. 29I 

. Our Lord does not say, cleanse the inside 
of the cup and leave the outside dirty ; on 
the contrary, the inside is made clean in 
order "that the outside may be clean also." 
The inward work is the best way of secur- 
ing the outward. Religion which begins 
with gilt Bibles and costly Prayer-books, 
with stained windows and velvet cushions, 
with solemn tones and downcast looks and 
head bent reverently low, begins with cleans- 
ing the outside of the cup and of the platter. 
On the other hand, the man who claims to 
be a saint, because he neglects all the 
decencies of religion, only proves that he 
is unclean inside as well as outside. The 
external marks of reverence and devotion 
are right so far as they are the genuine ex- 
pression of a reverent and devout spirit. 
The mistake is in considering these external 
marks as the thing itself. The fear of God 
in the heart will find its natural expression 
in a reverent attitude and manner in the 
external worship of God. The love of God 
in the heart will, like Mary with her alabas- 
ter box of precious ointment, find some fit- 
ting way of expressing its grateful affection. 
Only let us never mistake the externals of 
religion for religion itself. 



292 THE OUTSIDE OF THE CUP, ETC. 

The sins of the Pharisees have their ana- 
logues in every-day life among us now. 
The man who is intolerant towards those 
that differ from him in opinion or practice, 
who is harsh in his judgments of the erring, 
who believes no good of such as do not 
come up to his own particular standard, 
who is more exacting in regard to others 
than in regard to himself, who takes secret 
pleasure in the shortcomings of others, 
whose religious observances lead him to 
unfavorable thoughts of the religion of 
others, who is at heart censorious, malig- 
nant and bitter, — such a man needs to look 
well at the inside of his cup and of his plat- 
ter. Holiness of heart has indeed its natu- 
ral outgrowth in holiness of living. But that 
external sanctity is to be doubted which has 
not its root in a principle of love within. 




LI. 



THE DESERTED HOUSE. 



(Matthew xxiii. 29-39.) 

TN travelling through the country, we 
•*■ sometimes pass a dwelling-house which 
has been abandoned. A more cheerless and 
desolate picture it is difficult to imagine. 
The hearth-stone, once ruddy with the ge- 
nial glow which was only a fit emblem of 
the warm hearts gathered round it, is now 
cold and black; the chambers, where once 
brothers and sisters and honored guests 
exchanged sweet words of fellowship and 
love, are now silent as the grave, or, if vocal 
at all, it is only with the dull, muffled noise 
of some concealed worm or grub, working 
its way among the decaying timbers ; the 
halls, once gay with festive life, where the 
arts of music, painting, sculpture, and em- 
broidery had filled the eye and the ear with 



294 THE DESERTED HOUSE. 

pleasant sights and sounds, are now only a 
receptacle for dirt and rubbish. The doors 
are oft' their hinges, the windows are broken 
out, every floor and casement has its cover- 
ing of dust, unbroken, except by the tracks 
of loathsome vermin ; the pleasant little 
nooks and corners, where once the children 
held high revel, are given over now to bats 
and spiders. Barely enough is left of what 
was once a human dwelling to show by the 
contrast how cheerful it was, how cheerless 
it is. 

"Behold, your house is left to you deso- 
late ! " It was the doom pronounced by our 
Lord upon the Jews in reference to the tem- 
ple which was the seat of their national re- 
ligion. It is the doom of every human soul 
that is deserted of God. Once the abode of 
gracious and hallowed influences, visited by 
throngs of pure desires and holy thoughts, 
the chambers of its imagination peopled with 
shining occupants, its halls vocal with the 
songs of gladness, and pervaded in every 
part with the warmth of love and with light 
from heaven, it has, alas, been given over 
to desolation and ruin. No cheering ray 
from the sun any longer lights up its sad 



THE DESERTED HOUSE. 295 

corridors. Hope has fled affrighted, love 
and purity have quenched their fires, un- 
clean thoughts and desires have trailed their 
slime over all the secret haunts of memory, 
the doomed soul has become indeed desolate 
and chill, — a deserted dwelling, or, if in- 
habited at all, an abode of loathsome vermin 
only ! 

When our Lord pronounced these words 
over Jerusalem, the Jews little thought, not 
even his disciples thought, how 7 utterly that 
beautiful temple should be defaced and 
ruined, — what a spectacle of desolation it 
should be to the future traveller. So when 
we see a vouncr man adorned with whatever 
can dignify and grace the human character, 
his face lit up with health and hope, his con- 
science tender, his mind occupied with 
thoughts of God and the world to come, and 
all without and within him showing that his 
heart has been moved by the Holy Spirit, 
and that he is not far from the kingdom of 
God, it is difficult to realize that he can ever 
become such a moral ruin as that which has 
been described. 

We know, indeed, that there are such 
ruins. We meet them in our daily walks, — 



296 THE DESERTED HOUSE. 

men whom the Holy Spirit, grieved by their 
disobedience, has abandoned and given over 
to their own hearts' desires. There is no 
more pitiable spectacle in this world than 
that of a man thus deserted by God. A de- 
serted dwelling is but a feeble picture of the 
desolation and ruin that hang over such a 
soul. Yet such may every one become who 
grieves away the Spirit of God. 

The man who finds himself in such a 
case, the friends who see him to be in such 
a case, should cry mightily to God, that the 
Spirit who has been grieved away may re- 
turn once more and reinhabit that deserted 
abode. Thus only can its desolations be re- 
paired ; thus only can light and joy and 
purity be reinstated. 

How careful should we be of every motion 
within us that indicates the presence of the 
Holy Spirit working in the soul ! How 
promptly should we close the door to all 
those unworthy guests which so often come 
unbidden to our hearts, — those unholy 
thoughts and desires which defile the soul 
and grieve away its heavenly Guest. The 
time of special religious interest is also the 
time of special danger. It behooves us then 



THE DESERTED HOUSE. 297 

more than ever to be on our guard, lest, like 
the Jews of old, we know not the day of our 
visitation, and the heavenly Visitant take his 
final departure, saying to us, as he said to 
them, "Behold, your house is left to you 
desolate ! " 




LII. 



DOING AND KNOWING. 



(John vii. 14-31.) 

r I ^HE answer of our Saviour to the Jews, 
when they demanded of him greater 
evidence of the truth of his doctrine, is 
significant. They marvelled that one who 
appeared to be an unlettered mechanic 
should set himself up for a public teacher 
of religion ; they marvelled still more at 
the strangeness of his doctrine, most of it 
so unlike what they had been accustomed 
to hear from the rabbis, and so full of mys- 
terious words which they could not under- 
stand. 

Here is a man who seems to be just like 
all other men, and yet says, "where I am 
ye cannot come ; " who stands up before the 
immense multitude in the temple area, on 
the great day of the feast, and says, "He 



DOING AND KNOWING. 299 

that believeth in me, out of his belly shall 
flow rivers of living water ; " a man not yet 
fifty years old, who declares " before Abra- 
ham was, I am ;" "my Father worketh hith- 
erto, and I work;" "I and my Father are 
one ; " " He that eateth me, even he shall live 
by me " : a man whose birth and parentage 
were publicly known, and, indeed, not de- 
nied by himself, and yet he says, " I am from 
above ; " "I proceeded and came forth from 
the Father" : who at one moment holds out 
the most encouraging words, saying " Come 
unto me all ye that labor and are heavy 
laden," and then again, "No man can come 
unto me unless the Father which hath sent 
me draw him." What a mass of contradic- 
tions ! How obscure and dark these sayings ! 
We cannot understand what he sayeth ! If 
he be the Messiah whom we expect, why 
does he not tell us plainly? 

What was the great Teacher's reply to 
these sceptical difficulties and doubts of his 
hearers? "He that doeth his [God's] will 
shall know of the doctrine." What I teach 
is plain enough to one who is an obedient 
and loving child of God. This difficulty 
which you have in comprehending my 



300 DOING AND KNOWING. 

teaching, is in part a judicial blindness, 
sent upon you because of your hardness of 
heart, and your disobedience to God's will. 
What is wanted, in order to your under- 
standing these and other mysteries of the 
gospel, is not any plainer declaration of 
these doctrines, or any profounder study ; 
but a better practice of what you do know : 
a holier life. Do God's will and you shall 
know more of his word. The best way to 
have all these doubts and difficulties cleared 
up, is to go to work and live up to the light 
which you have, and you shall have more 
light. Work and you shall know. 

How significant was this awswer ! How 
full of practical wisdom, not to the Jews of 
that day merely, but to all men through all 
time; not on religious subjects merely, but 
on all subjects of human inquiry. Clear 
knowledge goes hand in hand with obedient 
action. Mere bookmen, intellectual dream- 
ers, who shut themselves up in the seclusion 
of the closet, and undertake by pure reason 
to p'enetrate the mysteries of knowledge, 
are always in the fog. It is only when they 
come out into the clear sunlight of actual 
life, and mix themselves up with affairs and 



DOING AND KNOWING. 30I 

bring their speculations into contact with 
hard realities that the fog and mist are fully 
swept away, and they reach some certainty 
of knowledge. Compare the hair-spun re- 
finements of the monastic schoolmen, spec- 
ulating on entity and quiddity, with the 
sturdy, abiding sense of Bacon, the man of 
affairs, or of Jonathan Edwards, the revi- 
val preacher, and you will understand that 
even in metaphysics and philosophy, min- 
gling with affairs is a safe and wholesome 
corrective to the crudities of the closet. 
There is something in the sober realities of 
the work-day world that dissipates the dis- 
tempers of the brain. The dreams of the 
fancy are made to jostle rudely, but not 
unkindly, with hard, inexorable facts, and 
so the bookman becomes wiser. Even to 
him we may conceive the Saviour saying, 
"Work, if you would know." 

I knew a gentleman, a schemer in educa- 
tion, who had never taught, but had read 
much and speculated much on the subject, 
and had many fine theories of the art of 
teaching. His wife dying and leaving upon 
his hands two motherless children, he deter- 
mined to put in practice upon them the 
26 



302 DOING AND KNOWING. 

schemes which he had conceived. His first 
principle of education was that children 
should be taught nothing but what they 
could thoroughly understand ; that they 
should first know the reason of a thing, 
and then commit it to memory. Instead of 
teaching the multiplication table in the usual 
way, and requiring them to commit to mem- 
ory as useful facts the combinations in that 
mysterious and time-honored parallelogram, 
he paused at each step to explain to those 
infant minds the rationale of multiplication ; 
and not until they could understand, or 
thought they understood, just how seven 
times nine make sixty-three, would he allow 
them to receive it as a fact, and lay it away 
for use in the memory. What up-hill work 
it was ! In what a perpetual mist those 
youthful brains were kept. It was like re- 
fusing to let them walk until they had 
learned the theory of muscular action. 
When a child has learned its tables and has 
begun to practise arithmetic, the theory of 
it is easy enough. A single explanation 
makes it plain for ever. The practice and 
the theory must go together, or, if separated 
at all, the practice must go first, and the 



DOING AND KNOWING. 303 

theory follow. Half an hour's explanation, 
after a boy has been drilled in the practice 
of an arithmetical rule, will do more towards 
making its rationale plain to him than weeks 
of preliminar}^ and preparatory study. 

The great Teacher is leading us by a 
way which we do not know. In heavenly 
knowledge especially, we are all children. 
It is our business to accept as certainties 
whatever truths we find clearly recorded in 
our text-book, to make ourselves familiar 
with these truths, and to carry them out 
into practice in our every-day life. If we 
thus act up to the light we have, and do our 
Father's will, we shall know more of his 
doctrine. If we are troubled with difficul- 
ties about the unsearchable mystery of the 
Trinity, the cure for us is, not to give our- 
selves up to abstruse studies and specula- 
tions, but to look up with adoring love to 
our heavenly Father, to think with fond 
endearment of our elder Brother, to cherish 
a tender solicitude for the gracious indwell- 
ing of the Comforter. 

Perhaps your trouble is of another kind. 
You are constantly in gloomy doubt about 



304 DOING AND KNOWING. 

your own personal interest in the Saviour's 
death. You are constantly saying to your- 
self, " O that I could look into the Lamb's 
book of life and see whether or not my name 
is written there ! How shall I find out 
whether or not I am a Christian?" So you 
shut yourself up alone, and spend your 
days and nights in exploring the recesses 
of your own heart. No wonder that you 
are in darkness. Come out from that region 
of mist and of morbid selfishness, and begin 
to do something for Christ. Engage in ac- 
tive service as a Christian ; go to the prayer- 
meeting ; teach in the Sabbath school ; 
give your money to the cause of Christ; 
visit the sick and the poor ; hunt up some- 
body that does not go to church and bring 
him in ; speak to some unconverted per- 
son, and try to persuade him to be a Chris- 
tian ; read the Bible to some ignorant 
person, who knows nothing of the way of 
life. Do something. Do those things which 
spiritually-minded Christians do, and which 
worldly people do not. If you are not a 
Christian, you will soon find it out; you 
will find these services distasteful and irk- 



DOING AND KNOWING. 305 

some. The more you practise them the 
more disagreeable they will be, until they 
become intolerable, and you will be obliged 
to abandon them and your hope together. 
On the other hand, if you are a true child 
of God you will find his service growing 
more and more agreeable. It will gradually 
become your highest delight. You will 
gradually cease thinking of yourself, in the 
unceasing thoughts you will have of him 
and of his work. Your heart will go forth 
with unbidden tenderness and affection, and 
if, in the midst of your abundant labors for 
Christ, and of that adoring love with which 
you look to him, you ever turn aside to 
think of yourself, your answer will rise 
spontaneously, as did that of Paul, and of 
the sainted Alexander, "I know whom I 
have believed ! " 

It is not meant, of course, to discourage 
any one from careful study, and especially 
from the duty of self-examination. But we 
must be careful, on the other hand, not to 
cultivate a habit of morbid self-introspection 
to the neglect of the practical duties of re- 
ligion. Our piety will be more healthful if 



306 DOING AND KNOWING. 

we learn to look less at ourselves and more 
to Christ and the work which he has given 
us to do. For there is a wide and far-reach- 
ing significance in his words, that "He who 
doeth his will shall know of the doctrine ! " 




Cambridge : Stereotyped and Printed by John Wilson & Son. 



THE NEW JUVENILES. 



Elje Bessie Books* 



I. BESSIE AT THE SEASIDE. i6mo .... $1.25 
II. BESSIE IN THE CITY, i6mo ...... 1.25 

III. BESSIE AND HER FRIENDS. i6mo . . . 1.25 

IV. BESSIE AMONG THE MOUNTAINS. i6mo. 1.25 
V. BESSIE AT SCHOOL. i6mo 1.25 

VI. BESSIE ON HER TRAVELS. (Preparing.) . 1.25 

" Bessie is a very charming specimen of little girlhood. It is a lovely story oi 
home and nursery life among a family of bright, merry little children." — Pres&y- 
terian. 



Buttery's jBtsfjts. 

BY THE AUTHOR OF THE " WIN AND WEAR " SERIES. 

Six vols, in a box. $4.50. 



I . At Mount Mansfield. 
II. At Saratoga. 
III. At Niagara. 



IV. At Montreal. 

V. At the Sea Side. 
VI. In Philadelphia. 



(TJiese volumes are not sold separately.} 



HOW JENNIE FOUND HER LORD. By the 

author of " The Golden Ladder Series." i8mo O.CO 



3 
TIBBY THE CHARWOMAN, and Other Stories. 

i8mo $0.6o 

A very charming Scotch story. 

Dr. Newton's New Book, 

BIBLE WONDERS. By the Rev. Richard Newton, 

D.D. 6 illustrations. i6mo . 1.2* 

LITTLE EFFIE'S HOME. By the author of " Bertie 

Lee," " Donald Fraser," &c. i6mo. 4 fine illustrations . . . . 1.25 

LITTLE DROPS OF RAIN. By the author of 

"Nell's Mission." i6mo. 4 illustrations , I.OO 

NELL'S MISSION. i8mo 0.60 

GRANDFATHER'S NELL. By the author of 

" Squire Downing's Heirs." 4 fine illustrations. i6mo .... 1.25 

MARGARET RUSSELL'S SCHOOL. 4 illus. . . 1.25 

SQUIRE DOWNING'S HEIRS. 4 illustrations . . 1.25 

THE LITTLE PEAT CUTTERS ; or, The Song 

of Love. By Emma Marshall. i8mo O.60 

TEDDY'S DREAM; or, A Little Sweep's Mis- 
sion. By Emma Leslie. i8mo 0.60 

LITTLE JACK'S FOUR LESSONS. By the author 

of " Ellen Montgomery's Bookshelf," &c. i6mo O.75 

HEBREW HEROES. By A. L. O. E. i6mo . . . 1.50 

THE GOLDEN FLEECE. By A. L. O. E. i6mo . 1.00 

LITTLE FREDDIE FEEDING HIS SOUL. i8mo 0.60 

AUNT MILDRED'S LEGACY. By the author of 

"Battles Worth Fighting." i6mo . . . K25 



THE LILY SERIES. By Mrs. Sherwood. 6 vols. 

in a box $2.50 

Containing l — 

Flowers of the Forest. Little Woodman. 

Little Beggars. Young Forester. 

The Two Orphans. Joan the Trusty. 

JACK, THE -CONQUEROR. By the author of 

" Paul's Penny and Peter's Pound." 16 illustrations .... O.9O 

JOHN CAREY ; or, What is a Christian ? By 

A. L. O. E. 6 illustrations O.QO 

TALES FROM ALSACE; or, Scenes and Por- 
traits from Life in the Days of the Reformation. i6mo 1.50 

OUR LIFE IN CHINA. By Mrs. Helen S. C. 

Nevius. Illustrated. r6mo I»50 

THE AGATE STORIES. By the author of the 

"Basket of Flowers." 6 vols, in a box. 18 illustrations . . . 2.00 

THE PEARL OF PARABLES. By Rev. Dr. Ham- 
ilton. 9 illustrations 1.2^ 

33? X\z Mot of t&e " again anil Wlzwc" &erie& 

I. ROBERT LINTON: What Life Taught Him. 1.25 

II. WEIGHED IN THE BALANCE 1 25 

III. GIRDING ON THE ARMOR 1.25 

IV BINDING THE SHEAVES 1.25 

V. EDGED TOOLS 1.25 

Wqz "ffirent JEountain Series," 

Containing the last five books in a neat box, $6.00. 



DOLLY'S CHRISTMAS CHICKENS .... 0.60 
MAGGIE AND THE SPARROWS .... .0.60 



By the Authors of" The Wide Wide World," and " Dollars 
and Cents" 

Efre SEortr Series* 

I. WALKS FROM EDEN. i6mo ...... $1.50 

II. THE HOUSE OF ISRAEL. i6mo . . . . . 1.50 

III. THE STAR OUT OF JACOB. i6mo . . . 1.50 

A most entertaining and instructive series, adapted alike to old and young. 

♦ 

THE WEAVER BOY WHO BECAME A MIS- 
SIONARY. Being the Story of Dr. Livingstone. i6mo , . . . 1,25 

A SEQUEL TO THE PEEP OF DAY. 18 illus- 
trations o«75 

SUSY'S SACRIFICE. By the author of* the " Golden 

Ladder" series. 4 illustrations. i6mo 1. 2 5 

THE GOLDEN LADDER SERIES. Stories illus- 
trative of the Lord's Prayer. 6 vols, in a box # «? ,5q 

NELLIE'S STUMBLING BLOCK. By the same 

author T . 2 - 

THE A. L. O. E. LIBRARY. 37 vols, in a wooden case 33.00 

DONALD FRASER. By the author of " Bertie Lee," 

&c. 4 illustrations. i6mo LOG 




jQeto enititm*. 



SHEER OFF. By A. L. O. E $0.90 

BATTLES WORTH FIGHTING. 6 illus. i6mo . 1.25 
THE RAINBOW SERIES. By the Rev. P. B. 

Power. 5 vols, in a box 3.75 

Containing : — 
Last Shilling. A Fagot of Stories. 

Two Brothers. Stamp on it, John. 

Three Cripples. 

MINISTERING CHILDREN. i2mo. 20 illustra- 

1 tions, $1.75; or, in two vols. 1 8mo I 3o 

A SEQUEL TO MINISTERING CHILDREN. 

i2mo, $1.75; or in two vols. i8mo 180 

THE MINISTERING CHILDREN LIBRARY. 

Containing "Ministering Children" and "Sequel." 4 vols, in a 

neat box 3-6o 

ENGLAND'S YEOMEN. By the same author. i2mo 1.75 
ELLEN MONTGOMERY'S BOOKSHELF. 5 vols. 

in a box 6.00 

LITTLE KITTY'S LIBRARY. 6 vols, in a box . . 3.60 
HELENA'S HOUSEHOLD. A Tale of Rome in 

the First Century, nmo 2.00 

By the Rev. Dr. Newton. 

I. THE BEST THINGS $1.25 

II. THE KING'S HIGHWAY 1.25 

III. THE SAFE COMPASS 1.25 

IV. BIBLE BLESSINGS 1.25 

V. THE GREAT PILOT 1.25 

VI. BIBLE JEWELS 1.25 

" Ww Jtawel Case," 

Containing the above six volumes in a neat box, $7.50. 



7 

RILLS FROM THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE. By 

Rev. Dr. Newton $I.2C 

THE GIANTS, AND HOW TO FIGHT THEM . 0.75 

— ♦ — 

ftfje "Wlin atttr BHear" Series. 

I. WIN AND WEAR 1.25 

II. TONY STARR'S LEGACY 1.25 

III. FAITHFUL AND TRUE ......... 1.25 

IV. NED'S MOTTO 1.25 

V. TURNING A NEW LEAF ........ 1.25 

VI. MY NEW HOME 1.25 

&ty " Win anfc Wear " 3Ltbrarg, 

Containing the above six volumes in a neat box, #7.50. 

By the author of the " Schonberg-Cotta Family? 

I. THE CRIPPLE OF ANTIOCH 1.25 

II. THE MARTYRS OF SPAIN 1.25 

III. TALES AND SKETCHES 1.25 

IV. THE TWO VOCATIONS 1.25 

V. CHRISTIAN LIFE IN SONG . 1.25 

VI. WANDERINGS OVER BIBLE LANDS . . . 1.25 

— ♦_ 

SCHOOL AND HOME. A Boy's Journal. i6mo . 1.25 

THE OLD PICTURE BIBLE. . 1.25 

FATHER CLEMENT 1.00 

THE SCHOOL-GIRL IN FRANCE .1.00 

THE STORY OF MARTIN LUTHER 1.25 

A RAY OF LIGHT. By the author of "A Trap to 

Catch a Sunbeam " O.9O 

THE WYCLIFFITES, By Mrs. Mack ay 1.25 

THE BOOK AND ITS STORY 1.50 

THE BOOK OF ANIMALS ooo 



CLAUDE THE COLPORTEUR $1.25 

THE LISTENER. By Caroline Fry 1.50 

THE YOUNG MAN'S FRIEND. By Rev. John 

Angell James I»2j> 

THE YOUNG WOMAN'S FRIEND. By the Rev. 

John Angell James I«2£ 

THE FOOTSTEPS OF ST. PAUL. By the Rev. 

J. R. Macduff I. CO 

THE POST OF HONOUR. A Tale 1.25 

SHADY SIDE • 1.25 

VARA; or, The Child of Adoption. . . . . . 1.50 

NELLIE OF TRURO 1.50 

THE JULIA 1.50 

VERY LITTLE TALES FOR VERY LITTLE 

CHILDREN. 2 vols. I.50 

LITTLE ANNIE'S FIRST AND SECOND BOOKS. 

2 vols. Illustrated I«5<> 

MAMMA'S BIBLE STORIES, and Seojjel. 2 vols. 1.80 

SEA DRIFTS. By Mrs. McLeod 1.25 

THE HIGHLAND PARISH. By Dr. McLeod . . 1.25 
MELBOURNE HOUSE. By the author of the " Wide 

Wide World." nmo 2.00 

THE OLD HELMET. By the same author. i2mo . 2.25 
SUNDAY AFTERNOONS IN THE NURSERY. 

By the author of " Ministering Children" „ 0.9O 

WATTS' DIVINE AND MORAL SONGS. Beauti- 

tifully illustrated. Square 0*75 

THE CHILD'S BOOK. By Mrs. Sigourney . . . 0.60 

FANNY AND HER MAMMA 0.90 

CLEVER STORIES. By Mrs. Sherwood .... 0.90 

LITTLE LESSONS FOR LITTLE LEARNERS . 0.90 

RHYMES FOR THE NURSERY 0.90 



CARTERS' 

FIRESIDE LIBRARY. 



First Series. 90 Cents $er Volume. 

BY A. L. O. E. 

1. THE CLAREMONT TALES. 

2. THE ADOPTED SON; and Other Tales. Con- 

taining "Walter Binning," "Wings and Stings," and "True Hero- 
ism." 

3. THE YOUNG PILGRIM. 

4. THE GIANT KILLER, AND SEQUEL. Containing 

"The Giant Killer" and the " Roby Family." 

5. FLORA; or, Self-Deception. 

6. THE NEEDLE AND THE RAT. Containing the 

" Story of a Needle," and the "Rambles of a Rat." 

7. EDDIE ELLERSLIE, AND THE MINE 

Containing " Old Friends " and the " Mine." 

8. PRECEPTS IN PRACTICE. 

9. THE CHRISTIAN'S MIRROR. 

10. IDOLS IN THE HEART: A Tale. 

11. PRIDE AND HIS PRISONERS. 

12. THE SHEPHERD OF BETHLEHEM. 

13. THE POACHER. Containing " Harry Dangerfield " 

and " Angus Tarlton." 

34. THE CHIEF'S DAUGHTER. Containing "Day 

Break in Britain " and " Parliament in the Playroom." 

15. THE LOST JEWEL. 

16. STORIES ON THE PARABLES. Containing " Black 

Cliff" and " Broken Chain." 

17. NED MANTON. Containing the "Cottage by the 

Stream " and " My Neighbor's Shoes." 

18. WAR AND PEACE. A Story of Cabul. 

19. THE ROBBERS' CAVE. A Story of Italy. 

20. THE CROWN OF SUCCESS. 

21. THE REBEL RECLAIMED. A Tale. 

22. THE SILVER CASKET. A Tale. 

23. CHRISTIAN CONQUESTS. Containing "Bags of 

Gold " and " Falsely Accused." 



IO CARTERS' FIRESIDE LIBRARY. 

First Series. 90 Cents $er Vol. 

24. TRY AGAIN, AND OTHER STORIES. Containing 

"Esther Parsons" and "Paying Dear." 

25. CORTLEY HALL. Containing " Straight Road " 

and "Jewish History." 

26. GOOD FOR EVIL. 

27. CHRISTIAN'S PANOPLY. Containing "Ned Franks" 

and "Red Cross Knight." 

28. EXILES IN BABYLON. 

29. GILES OLDHAM. 

30. A NUTSHELL OF KNOWLEDGE. 

31. RESCUED FROM EGYPT. 

32. THE TRIUMPH OVER MIDIAN. 

33. SUNDAY CHAPLET. A Series of Stories. 

34. HOLIDAY CHAPLET. A Series of Stories. 

35. CHILDREN'S TREASURY. 

36. THE LAKE IN THE WOODS. 

37. SHEER OFF. A Tale. 39. HOUSE BEAUTIFUL. 

38. JOHN CAREY. A Tale. 40. ON THE WAY. 



ANNA; or, A Daughter at Home. 

AUNT EDITH ; or, Love to God the Best Motive. 

MABEL GRANT. A Highland Story. By Ballantyne. 

LIFE OF CAPTAIN BATE. By the Rev. John Baillie 

THE BLACK SHIP, and Other Allegories. 

BLIND LILIAS; or, Fellowship with God. 

BLIND MAN'S HOLIDAY. A Series of Short Stories. 

THE INDIAN TRIBES OF GUIANA. By Brett. 

BROAD SHADOWS ON LIFE'S PATHWAY. A Tale. 

BROTHER AND SISTER; or, The Way of Peace. 

THE BROTHER'S WATCHWORD. 

BUNYAN'S PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 

CLARA STANLEY; or, A Summer among the Hills. 

LITTLE CROWNS, AND HOW TO WIN THEM. By 
the Rev. Jos. A. Collier. 

CONSTANCE AND EDITH; or, Incidents of Home. 

THE COTTAGE AND ITS VISITOR. By the author 

of "Ministering Children." 

CRIPPLE DAN. By Andrew Whitgift. 
DAYBREAK; or, Truth Struggling and Triumphant 



CARTERS' FIRESIDE LIBRARY. IJL 

First Series. 90 Cents J>er Vol. 

DAYS AT MUIRHEAD; or, Olive's Holidays. 

DAYS OF OLD. By the author of " Ruth." 

EMILY VERNON; or, Filial Piety Exemplified. 

THE CHILDREN OF THE MANSE. By Mrs. Duncan 

EDWARD CLIFFORD ; or, The Memories of Childhood 

ELLIE RANDOLPH. 

FANNY AIKEN. 

FAR OFF. By the Author of " Peep of Day." 

FLORENCE EGERTON; or, Sunshine and Shadow. 

VESPER. By the Countess De Gasparin. 

ALICE AND ADOLPHUS. By Mrs. Gatty. Containing 

" Proverbs Illustrated " and "Worlds not Realized." 

AUNT JUDY'S TALES. By Mrs. Gatty. 

PARABLES FROM NATURE. By Mrs. Gatty. Con- 

taining " Motes in the Sunbeam " and " Circle of Blessing." 

MAY DUNDAS. By Mrs. Geldart. 

GRANDMAMMA'S SUNSHINE, and Other Stories. 

By the author of "Kitty's Victory," &c Containing "Annie Price" 
and " Lost Spectacles." 

THE HAPPY HOME. By James Hamilton, D.D. 

MEMOIR OF LADY COLQUHOUN. By J. Hamilton. 

HASTE TO THE RESCUE. . 

LIFE OF GENERAL HAVELOCK. 

THE INFANT'S PROGRESS. By Mrs. Sherwood. 

JACK THE CONQUEROR. By C. E. Bowen. 

JAMIE GORDON; or, The Orphan. 

JEANIE MORRISON; or, The Discipline of Life. 

JOLLY AND KATY IN THE COUNTRY. 

EARNEST CHRISTIAN: A Memoir of Mrs. Jukes. 

KATE KILBORN. By the author of " Jeanie Morrison " 

KATE AND EFFIE ; or, Prevarication. 

KITTY'S VICTORY, AND OTHER STORIES. 

LIFE OF RICHARD KNILL. 

THE LIGHTED VALLEY. A Memoir of Miss Bolton. 

LITTLE LYCHETTS. By the author of "John Halifax." 

LOUIS AND FRANK. Containing " Three Months under 

the Snow" and " Frank Harrison." 

MABEL'S EXPERIENCE. 

THE FAMILY AT HEATHERDALE. Bv Mrs. Mackay. 



12 CARTERS' FIRESIDE LIBRARY. 

First Series. 90 Cents fer Vol, 

MARGARET WARNER. 

MAUD SUMMERS, THE SIGHTLESS. 

THE CONVENT. A Tale. By Miss McCrindell. 

MIA AND CHARLIE; or, A Week's Holiday. 

MINISTERING CHILDREN. A Tale. By Miss Charles- 

worth. With 18 Illustrations. 2 vols. 

SEQUEL TO MINISTERING CHILDREN. 2 vols 

MY SCHOOLBOY DAYS AND YOUTHFUL COM- 
PANIONS. In one vol. 

NEAR HOME; or, The Countries of Europe De- 
scribed. By the author of the " Peep of Day," &c. 

THE WORLD OF WATERS. By Mrs. Osborne. 

PASSING CLOUDS; or, Love conojjering Evil. 

THE PET RABBITS. 

PETER'S POUND AND PAUL'S PENNY. 

TALES OF THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. Con- 
taining "Helen of the Glen," "The Persecuted Family," and "Ralph 
Gemmell." By Robert Pollok. 

THE RIVAL KINGS. By the author of " Sidney Grey." 

ROUND THE FIRE. A Series of Stories. 

RUTH AND HER FRIENDS. 

SALE OF CRUMMIE. Containing the " Diamond 

Brooch" and the "Buried Bible." 

SIDNEY GREY. A Story for Boys. 

OLIVE LEAVES. By Mrs. L. H. Sigourney. 

LETTERS TO MY PUPILS. By Mrs. L. H. Sigourney. 

WATER DROPS. By Mrs. L. H. Sigourney. 

HOLIDAY HOUSE. By Catherine Sinclair. 

ROUGHING IT WITH ALICK BAILLIE. 

TALES OF ENGLISH HISTGRY. 

TALES OF SWEDEN AND THE NORSEMEN. 

TALES OF TRAVELLERS. By Maria Hack. 

CONTRIBUTIONS OF Q, (^ By Jane Taylor. 

THE TORN BIBLE. 

ABBEOKUTA; or, Sunrise in the Tropics. By Tucker, 

THE RAINBOW IN THE NORTH. By Miss Tucker. 

THE SOUTHERN CROSS. By Miss Tucker. 

WARFARE AND WORK. A Tale. 

THE WAY HOME. 

THE WEEK. 



CARTERS' FIRESIDE LIBRARY. 13 

First Series. 90 Cents per Vol, 
WILLIE AND UNICA. Containing " Little Willie " and 

" Unica." 

LIFE OF WILBERFORCE. By Mary A. Collier. 

LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF SCOTTISH LIFE. By 

Prof. Wilson. 
THE WOODCUTTER OF LEBANON, AND THE 

EXILES OF LUCERNA. By Rev. J. R. Macduff, D.D. 



Second Series. 75 Cents per Vol. 
AFRICA^ MOUNTAIN VALLEY. By the author oi 

"Ministering Children." 

ASHTON COTTAGE. A Tale. 

LIFE STUDIES. By the Rev. John Baillie. 

BERTIE LEE. 4 cuts. 

BROOK FARM; or, American Country Life. 

CHARLES ROUSSELL; or, Industry and Honesty. 

CHILDREN ON THE PLAINS. By Aunt Friendly. 

THE COMMANDMENT WITH PROMISE. 

COSMO'S VISIT TO HIS GRANDPARENTS. 

THE COTTAGE FIRESIDE; or, The Parish School. 

FIRST AND LAST JOURNEY. 

FRANK NETHERTON; or, The Talisman. 

FRITZ HAROLD. A Story from the German. 

THE JEWISH TWINS. By Aunt Friendly. 

RASSELAS, PRINCE OF ABYSSINIA. By Dr. Johnson. 

THE LAST WEEK OF DAVIS JOHNSON, Jr. 

MAGDALA AND BETHANY. By the Rev. S. C. Malan. 

MARION'S SUNDAYS. 

MICHAEL KEMP, THE HAPPY FARMER'S LAD. 

THE MINE ; or, Darkness and Light. By A. L. O. E. 

NEW COBWEBS TO CATCH FLIES. 

NEWTON'S GIANTS, AND HOW TO FIGHT THEM 

TALES OF LYING. By Amelia Opie. 

THE LAST SHILLING. By the Rev. P. B. Power. 

THE THREE CRIPPLES. By the Rev. P. B. Power. 

THE TWO BROTHERS. By the Rev. P. B. Power. 

A FAGOT OF STORIES. By Rev. P. B. Power. 

STAMP ON IT, JOHN. By Rev. P. B. Power. 



I4 CARTERS' FIRESIDE LIBRARY. 

Secoud Series. 75 Cents _per Vol* 

PRAYING AND WORKING; or, Some Account of 

What Men can do when in Earnest. By W. F. Stevenson. 

ANNALS OF THE POOR. By Legh Richmond. 
A SEQUEL TO " PEEP OF DAY." 
THE BOY'S BOOK. By Mrs. Sigourney. 
THE GIRL'S BOOK. By Mrs. Sigourney. 
ORIGINAL POEMS. By the Taylor Family. 
LIFE OF CAPTAIN VICARS. By Miss Marsh. 



Third Series. 60 Cents per Vol. 

ANNIE PRICE, and Other Stories. Six Engravings. 

THE BAGS OF GOLD. By A. L. O. E. 

THE BEAUTIFUL HOME. By the author of "Ministering 

Children." 

THE BLACK CLIFF. By A. L. O. E. 

THE BROKEN CHAIN. By A. L. O. E. 

THE BURIED BIBLE, and Other Stories. 

THE FARMER'S DAUGHTER. By Mrs. Cameron. 

CHILD'S BUNYAN. 

THE CITIES OF REFUGE. By the Rev. J. R. Macduff. 

DIAMOND BROOCH. 

DIARY OF BROTHER BARTHOLOMEW. 

DOLLY'S CHRISTMAS CHICKENS. 

ESTHER PARSONS, and Other Stories. By A. L. O. E. 

THE FAITHFUL SISTER. 

FALSELY ACCUSED. By A. L. O. E. 

FANNY THE FLOWER-GIRL. By Miss Bunbury. 

FRANK HARRISON. 

THE CIRCLE OF BLESSING. By Mrs. Gatty. 

MOTES IN THE SUNBEAM. By Mrs. Gatty. 

PROVERBS ILLUSTRATED. By Mrs. Gatty. 

WORLDS NOT REALIZED. By Mrs. Gatty. 

THE GIANT-KILLER. By A. L. O. E. 

THE GREAT JOURNEY. An Allegory. By Macduff. 

A MORNING BESIDE THE LAKE OF GALILEE. 

By James Hamilton, D.D. 

THE LAMP AND THE LANTERN; or, Light for 
the Tent and the Traveller. By James Hamilton, D.D. 



CARTERS' FIRESIDE LIBRARY. 15 

Third Series, 60 Cents per Vol. 

HAPPY CHARLIE. 

HARRY DANGERFIELD. By A. L. O. E. 
HOW PAUL'S PENNY BECAME A POUND. 
ANNA ROSS. By Grace Kennedy. 

PROFESSION IS NOT PRINCIPLE. By Grace 

Kennedy. 

PHILIP COLVILLE. By Grace Kennedy. 

LITTLE KATY AND JOLLY JIM. 

LITTLE FREDDIE FEEDING HIS SOUL. 

THE LITTLE PEAT-CUTTERS. By Marshall. 

LITTLE WILLIE. 

LIVING JEWELS. By A. L. O. E. 

THE LOST SPECTACLES, and Other Stories. 

THE GOLD THREAD. By Norman MacLeod, D.D 

MAGGIE AND THE SPARROWS. 

MALA AND CLEON. 

MORNING. 

MOTHER'S LAST WORDS, AND FATHER'S CARE. 

MY NEIGHBOR'S SHOES. By A. L. O. E. 

MY SCHOOLBOY DAYS. 

MY YOUTHFUL COMPANIONS. 

NED FRANKS. By A. L. O. E. 

NELL'S MISSION. 

OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. By A. L. O. E. 

OLD MARGIE'S FLOWER-STALL. 

PARLIAMENT IN THE PLAYROOM. By A. L. O. E. 

PAYING DEAR FOR IT. By A. L. O. E. 

RAMBLES OF A RAT. By A. L. O. E. 

RED-CROSS KNIGHT. By A. L. O. E. 

THE ROBY FAMILY. By A. L. O. E. 

CHARLIE SEYMOUR. By Catherine Sinclair. 

STORIES ON THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

STORIES OF JEWISH HISTORY. 

STORIES OF THE OCEAN. By Rev. John Spaulding. 

TEDDY'S DREAM. By Emma Leslie. 

THREE MONTHS UNDER THE SNOW. 

TIBBY THE CHARWOMAN. 

DISPLAY. A Tale. By Jane Taylor. 



3fi 



n 



1 5 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




' ' ) 



014 085 447 5 



sti 




mfl « ■"' • « '■■■'■■■ -•' 



